Fortunately, it's a rather dull week here in Barcelona (knocks on skull). TV3 is playing up the latest bit of Catalunacy: Seems that "Catalan culture" is the "guest of honor" at the Frankfurt book fair. The Institut Ramon Llull, whatever that is, has decided that only Catalan authors who write in Catalan will be represented. That means Catalan authors who write in Spanish will not be.

Catalan authors who write in Spanish, to be excluded: Eduardo Mendoza, Juan Marsé, Javier Cercas, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

Catalan authors who have received the Katalanisch seal of approval: Pere Gimferrer, Baltasar Porcel, Quim Monzó, Joan Francesc Mira, and Carme Riera.

Gee, is there some difference in the quality and reputation of the authors in the first group and the second? I submit there is, that the first group is much better, and also sells a hell of a lot more books. Monzó is the only author in Group Two you might want to consider reading; the rest produce boring wank. Especially Porcel, the stupidest intellectual this side of Harold Pinter. Besides, Porcel is Mallorcan, not Catalan at all.

Since Mendoza is no less Catalan than Monzó, it seems to me that the writers in Spanish are being unfairly discriminated against, and if there is a dime in tax money going to this shindig then a big stink should be made. It also seems to me that, since all these books are to be sold to foreign publishers to translate into their own languages, it doesn't matter what the original language they're written in is. As far as I know every book by a Catalan author in Spanish is immediately translated to Catalan anyway.

And this is a subject that has been "bitterly debated for months." Why? Should such a small thing be such a big deal? The problem with identity politics is that nobody can see beyond his own little group.

International news: Hamas is shelling the crap out of Gaza. 36 dead and 50 wounded so far. No one is indignant. Of course, if it were the Americans or, God forbid, the Israelis... I feel very strange, knowing that Al Fatah are actually the least bad of the two warring forces. Hamas is even worse than Arafat's corrupt thugs.

With the Palestinians killing each other, naturally British intellectuals have decided to boycott Israel. I am therefore boycotting all British intellectuals who are boycotting Israel. Step One is not reading or listening to or watching any British media but the Telegraph. Goodbye Guardian, Independent, and BBC.

Here's Rafael Ramos on page 10 of La Vanguardia yesterday: "The British university professors' union...joined by groups of doctors, journalists, architects, and even the Church of England are enthused by the possibility that a boycott similar to that decreed against apartheid South Africa may push the government, the Israeli ruling classes, and the Jewish lobby in the United States toward the real search for a solution to the Palestinian conflict...The disproportionate influence that the Israeli community exercises in North America (sic) is already well-known."

Complete and total anti-Semitism. Boycotting Israel while not boycotting Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Zimbabwe, Burma, et cetera, shows that the boycotter has his priorities confused, and the reason is that he doesn't mind leftist murders but he hates Jews. Comparing democratic Israel to apartheid South Africa is a foul, stinking piece of moral equivalency. And saying the Jewish lobby in the United States is behind Israeli policy equals believing that the Jews are running America for their own purposes. As an American, I call bullshit on that. The Americans are running America, and calling America a Jewish sock-puppet is the rankest Protocols of the Elders conspiracy theory.

More Ramos gems: He accuses Alan Dershowitz of "threatening" the British anti-Semites by calling for a counter-boycott, calling it "an attempt at intimidation." Says Ramos, "Money rules...the pressure organized by the hardest-line sector of the Israeli lobby in the US will probably succeed in watering down the boycott."

Largest immigrant communities in Spain: Morocco 575,000; Rumania 525,000; Ecuador 420,000; UK 315,000; Colombia 260,000; Bolivia 200,000; Germany 165,000; Argentina 140,000; Itasly 135,000; Bulgaria 120,000; China 105,000; Peru 100,000. Regions with more than 12% immigrants: Madrid, La Rioja, Catalonia, Valencia, Murcia, Balearics, and Canaries. Makes sense; except La Rioja, that's where the jobs are. Northern and western Spain get the fewest immigrants.

La Vangua's foreign correspondent in Havana reports that food rationing is making poor Cubans fat since they get lots of greasy carbs and not much else. Those rations last ten days or two weeks. Then they have to scrape up the rest of their food through the black market, theft, money sent by relatives, and prostitution. He also says that a high-capacity submarine fiber-optic cable is being laid between Cuba and Venezuela, which will multiply Castro's communications capacity by 2500. Since Cuba has about eight phone lines, prohibits Internet, and has no use for such a cable, since one-tenth of the cable's capacity would be enough to monitor all Venezuelan phone calls, and since a Cuban-Venezuelan company got a contract from Chavez to produce new ID cards and passports for all Venezuelan citizens (including a chip with all personal information), he is a bit suspicious.

The cops found two GRAPO weapons caches, one outside Barcelona and the other in Murcia. Let's hope this really is the end of the road.

Finally, under pressure by CiU, the Catalan "historical memory law" will pay homage to all the victims of the Civil War, and "not just those of the Francoist repression." The law will refer to "the memory and the dignity of the victims of political violence in the Republican rear-guard and the persons who suffered persecution because of their religious option." Pretty good but not good enough. If the law refers specifically to Franco and the Nationals as a band of murderers, but doesn't do the same to the Republican government in general and the CNT, POUM, and Communists in particular, it's not balanced.

Get this. The Air Force actually considered spending $7.5 million back in 1994 to research a chemical weapon ("hormone bomb") that would turn enemy soldiers gay; presumably, they would then proceed to arrange flowers and stage musicals while our troops would just, uh, cruise on by.

Not much big news. Zap and Rajoy had their meeting and nothing really happened. Maragall formally resigned as president of the Catalan Socialist Party, but he's been effectively in retirement since Montilla took over the Generalitat. Spain topped the 45 million mark in population; 4.5 million, a full 10%, are immigrants. Sarkozy's UMP cleaned up in the first round of the French parliamentary elections, with 40% of the vote; the Socialists got 25%, Bayrou got 8%, and the Commies, Greens, and National Front all got less than 5%. The runoff is next weekend and the Socialists are in a panic, calling on all the left parties to back them to "fight against the hegemony of the right." Bet it don't do no good.

Saturday night football was wild. With about one minute left in the simultaneous matches, Barça was beating Espanyol on two goals by Messi, one with his hand, and Zaragoza was beating Madrid. Barça would nearly have clinched the league title, as they'd have a three-point lead with one game to go. But Tamudo scored for Espanyol and Van Nistelrooy scored for Madrid, and both games suddenly ended in a draw. The Bar Els Rossos became very quiet and Xavi, the owner, went outside and smashed his signboard over one of the posts that keep people from parking on the sidewalk. Now Madrid has nearly clinched the league title, since all they have to do is beat a weak Mallorca team, and it doesn't matter what Barça does.

Barça had the league in its pocket twice, and gave up goals in the last minute first to Betis and then to Espanyol. They blew it. You can't win them all, though, and I wouldn't shake up the squad too badly. Ronaldinho and Eto'o still have upside to their careers, not to mention Messi.

Note: I do not know all the details of this story, but I do know that Messi signed with Barça when he was only about 13, and they gave him growth hormone, saying that he was undersized and had a deficiency. Players signing for pro teams below age 16, and pro teams giving their kids such powerful drugs, both seem wrong to me.

Andy Robinson, La Vanguardia's New York correspondent, is one of those guys who can never pass up an opportunity to sneer at American society. Never once has American society ever done anything sensible or reasonable, in Robinson's way of thinking.

So Andy decides to write a softball piece on food in the US. Naturally, he has criticized what he sees as the burger-laden "American diet" many times, never considering that many Americans do eat fresh vegetables and fish and lots of healthy stuff like that.

Now he's suddenly discovered that there is such a thing as a farmers' market. In case you'd never heard of them, every town of any size has one at least once a week. Local truck farmers sell their produce. My dad goes to the one in downtown Overland Park every Saturday morning in season to buy green beans and tomatoes and canteloupes and peaches and corn on the cob. You get a good deal both on quality and price. Not everybody shops there--Andy says only about 8-10% of Americans--but it's an available option that's becoming more popular. Andy adds that there are 44 farmers' markets in New York, more than ever before, which means that it's not only us folks out there in Kansas who can get this stuff.

This looks like a promising trend, Americans buying healthy fresh food locally, doesn't it?

Nope. Andy's take is that the reason behind it is that the Yanks are--get this--"frightened of the contamination of massified foods." The headline is, "Global fear, local food." It wouldn't be because the Americans are developing better tastebuds or want to be healthier or any other intelligent reason, it has to be because they're afraid. The Europeans constantly peddle the line that everything we do in America is because of fear.

He adds, "Ironically, 30 years ago massified and scientifically reconstructed food was considered safer and more hygenic than natural, local products." Huh? I remember lots of natural, local products available for sale in 1977. Hell, I remember going out to the local pick-your-own strawberry farm every summer, to the apple orchard every fall, and planting a fairly large garden as well. I don't remember anyone ever saying that such food was unsafe or not hygenic, at least not if you washed it first. In fact, that was the collectivist Seventies, when everybody was into brown rice and stuff like that. Duh. The other thing I remember people doing, which they don't do as much anymore, is putting up fresh foods for the winter in Mason jars.

Since ETA hasn't killed anybody yet, the big news here is the football. Real Madrid and Barcelona are tied on points at the top, with Sevilla two points back. Madrid holds the advantage in case of a tie in the standings. Each team has two matches left; Barcelona plays Espanyol tonight at home, Madrid plays Zaragoza away, and Sevilla plays Mallorca away. The games are all scheduled at the same time, 9 PM.

Madrid can clinch the title tonight if they win and Barça and Sevilla lose; Barça fans, of course, are rooting for a Madrid loss or draw combined with a Barça victory. Even a Barça draw would be acceptable if both Madrid and Sevilla lose.

Realistically, the most likely team of the three to fail would be Real Madrid, since they are playing away, Zaragoza is a good team, and it also has something to play for; with a victory it can clinch a spot in the UEFA cup next year. So Zaragoza will be a hyper-motivated opponent. Barça is playing at home, so it has the advantage; Espanyol is not a bad team, but they're playing for nothing but pride, since they're set in the midtable. Agreed, pride is a pretty strong motivation to beat your crosstown rival. Sevilla is playing away but Mallorca has nothing to play for; they're also set in the midtable. So Sevilla is likely to pull out a win.

There are rumors of maletines flying every which way; a maletín is a briefcase, and it is assumed to be full of cash. Everyone in Spain believes that Barça has offered a huge bonus to the Zaragoza players if they beat Madrid, and that Madrid has done the same to the Espanyol players. This practice is strictly illegal but everyone assumes that it happens all the time. You get in big trouble in the States if you get caught making payments of any sort to opposing players, and we just assume it isn't done at all.

Earlier this season Torii Hunter of the Minnesota Twins tried to pay off a promise he made at the end of last season; if the Kansas City Royals swept Detroit, Minnesota's rival for a playoff spot, he'd spring for a couple of cases of champagne. The Royals swept them, against all odds, and Hunter (known as an all-around good guy) was going to pay off at the beginning of this season when the Twins made their first visit to KC. Now, this is obviously just a fun thing, not real money--what does that cost, a couple grand for the good stuff? That's pocket change to a ballplayer--and a sign of respect between guys on different teams, but the league told them no, Caesar's ballplayers must be above all suspicion.

So tonight Ronaldinho can't play because of that ridiculous foul he got red-carded for in the last game two weeks ago. Rijkaard's lineup is going to be Valdés; Zambrotta, Puyol, Thuram, Van Bronckhorst; Xavi, Motta, Deco; Iniesta, Eto'o, Messi. Looks pretty good except for that large hole right in the middle named Motta. Márquez will be on the bench; why not play him there?

Batasuna leader Arnaldo Otegi was imprisoned at 1 PM today; the Supreme Court made his 15-month suspended sentence effective and he will have to serve it. Good. Zap is finally showing a little backbone. Now he has to ban the ANV, Batasuna's front party, in order to meet the PP's conditions for their support. Rajoy is not going to demand any firings; he said he didn't want to humiliate anyone, and declared that the PP would "shoulder its burden" against ETA as long as "there is no return to the path of negotiations."

Said Rajoy, "I will tell Zapatero that I will support anyone, no matter whether he has done things well or badly in the past, if he wants to defeat ETA." Good. Rajoy is going to be responsible and cooperate in order to reach everyone's goal. I think the PSOE is on board now and ETA will be crushed very soon. Unfortunately, it should have been crushed at least two years ago, and it wasn't thanks to Zap's acceptance of the alleged truce. Now some more people are going to be killed in ETA's last stand.

De Juana Chaos has already gone back on hunger strike and Judge Castro of the National Court ordered that he be force-fed if necessary. I wouldn't bother force-feeding him, I'd just let the son-of-a-bitch die. He wouldn't be missed. José Bono called him "an excrement of the human species," which is a pretty good one.

Nicolas Sarkozy is off to a good start: He's proposing an €11 billion tax cut, including the elimination of estate taxes for spouses and an €150,000 exemption for children, the elimination of taxes and "contributions" on overtime wages, a direct tax (income, property, capital gains) maximum limit of 50% of total income, an income tax exemption for students who earn less than three times minimum wage, and an income tax deduction on mortgage interest payments for the first five years. Sounds pretty good to me, since we all know that as much of national income as possible should stay in private hands. Viva Adam Smith.

Coincidentally, France is to hold national parliamentary elections next week; the first round is June 10 and the runoff is June 17. Sarkozy's UMP will roll.

A bunch of squatter hippie anarchists tried to disrupt the G-8 meeting. Fortunately, they didn't get within five miles of Bush and Merkel and Sarko. Way to go, cops! Beat 'em, thump 'em, let's go, Cops! I thought it was cool when the police launch ran over the Greenpeace boat.

By the way, here's the video of the Mossos roughing up the Russian girl.

Chemical Lali Solé claims today in La Vanguardia that the arms manufacturing sector is "the pivot" of America's GDP. America's GDP in 2006 was $13.2 trillion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Total American exports, including arms, and also food, machinery, technology, entertainment, raw materials, manufactured goods, and so on, added up to $1.4 trillion, while the domestic service sector alone accounted for $5.5 trillion.

The hippies at Common Dreams say that US arms exports totaled $9.7 billion in 2001, and that future contracts worth $12 billion were signed that year. $9.7 billion in arms is a very small percentage of $1.4 trillion. Gee whiz, looks to me like the "pivot" of the US economy is services, and arms exports are insignificant.

Meanwhile, in 2006, total US defense spending was $621 billion. That means total US defense spending is a little more than 2% of GDP. And Wikipedia says that a maximum of $1 trillion is spent on arms in the entire world per year.

You'd be surprised how easy it is to find neat statistics like these if you google "united states gdp", which Lali doesn't seem to have thought of doing.

Here's something interesting I came across by accident: an interview with former Barcelona mayor Pasqual Maragall in the International Herald Tribune from 1991, the year before the Olympics. Note the concern with street crime and heroin addiction; one has multiplied and the other has disappeared, because all the heroin addicts got AIDS and died. Maragall is rather dismissive of Catalan nationalism, hopeful about the European Union, and concerned by ETA terrorism--some things never change. Problems like immigration had not reared their heads yet.

One thing that all of us who criticize Maragall have to admit is that the Olympics really were a great success, and he probably did more than anyone else to make them one. Too bad he was such a lousy regional premier.

De Juana Chaos is in jail in Madrid, and they've ordered that he be force-fed if he goes on hunger strike again. Judge Garzón pulled the passports of Batasuna leaders Otegi and Barrena, and prosecutors have petitioned the Supreme Court to imprison Otegi based on his previous convictions and suspended sentences. Otegi may go to prison as soon as this evening. Zap and justice minister Fernández Bermejo publicly warned the ANV that it might be banned at any time under the Political Parties Act.

At 6 AM today, the French cops arrested three ETA medium-size fish, part of the recruiting squad, in a town near the Spanish frontier. One of them was in on the robbery of 350 pistols last year at a French factory, and another one is a suspect (he was acquitted in 2006) in a murder in Zaragoza, as well as being an instructor in explosives and firearms. French cops had been surveilling them for a couple of weeks, and decided to make the arrests now because they thought this cell might be ready to pull an attack in Spain.

Looks like Rajoy is pretty much getting what he wants, though I'd hold out for Conde Pumpido's head before I'd be willing to make nice. Then the responsible thing for Rajoy to say would be something like "We have many differences with Mr. Zapatero and the PSOE, but we know that we must work together with the PSOE and other democratic parties that oppose violence in order to form a united front and finally defeat ETA. We are willing to put aside our disagreements until the next election if the PSOE is willing to do the same." Besides being the right thing to do, it would also be politically expedient; the PP could go around saying "We're not dividers, we're uniters." They'd gain a lot of votes in the center and lose very few on the right; the right has nowhere else to go anyway.

The pundits say there's no way Zap's going to call an early election; it'll be in March 2008, and the Andalusian regional election will be held the same day. Reason: Andalusia is the PSOE's breadbasket, and Zap figures that the regional election will bring out even more voters there.

There's another piece of important terrorism news that won't get much play outside Spain: The Guardia Civil arrested six persons in Barcelona's Sant Andreu district last night. They're accused of being members of the "very violent Marxist-Maoist organization" GRAPO, sort of the Spanish version of the Red Brigades. They've been killing people since 1975, though not nearly as often as ETA. Two of those arrested murdered the wife of a Zaragoza businessman in February 2006, the gang's last killing. The other four were infrastructure, running safe houses and the like. This was apparently GRAPO's last operative cell. The leadership was arrested in June 2006 in Reus, and they ratted out this last bunch; one of them personally led the cops to the GRAPO safe house where the bust was made. The Guardia Civil says there may be more arrests, and that they have evidence that will solve several bank robberies.

Goodbye GRAPO and good riddance.

La Vanguardia's worst columnist, Baltasar Porcel, was awarded something called the Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes, which is passed out by an Catalanist organization called Ómnium Cultural. This guy is Earth's most boring novelist and least astute political commentator. He's getting old, though, and he just went through a bout of cancer, so we suppose this will make him happy in his twilight years without really hurting anyone else. A couple of people might actually be encouraged to read one of his books, but the damage will likely be minimal because no one has actually gotten beyond page 38 in any of them.

Past Porcel posts here.

Yesterday evening the Catalan police, the Mossos d'Esquadra ("Boys of the Squad") held a big old demo in downtown Barcelona, about 4000 strong, demanding that Communist interior counselor Joan Saura, in charge of the regional cops, resign. The Squad Boys say that they're demoralized and feel discredited, and that it's Saura's fault. Yeah, Saura is a dope and couldn't manage an ice cream stand; he's still a Commie, for Christ's sake. But the problems in the Mossos go back much farther than Saura's term in office, and Saura wasn't the guy who told the Mossos to beat up the Russian woman or not restrain the gypsy kid who jumped out of the squad car. I'm generally pro-law and order, but the Mossos have not looked at all good recently and they've got no one to blame but themselves.

TV3, which is not precisely a PP sock puppet, is reporting, based on anonymous police sources who met with Zapatero yesterday:

ETA is capable of immediately attacking anywhere in Spain...According to police information, ETA has taken advantage of the 14 months of truce to recover from the most recent police roundups. At this moment, ETA has about one hundred militants ready to take action, of which between 20 and 25 are organized into cells. It also has explosives and the technical and human means necessary to make car bombs.

The police fear that the gang will decide to commit an attack in order to cause alarm, and therefore is not ruling out a murder. Evidence confiscated from the "Donosti" cell, broken up at the beginning of this year, shows that the first target might be police officers, though ETA might also attack PSOE, or even PNV, political office holders, as the ETA communique announcing the end of the truce harshly criticized these two parties.

I don't know if my comment the other day had any effect or not--I know that a couple of people at La Vanguardia read this blog--but La Vanguardia has redesigned their website, which they have obviously been working on for months, and they have dropped the link to the prostitution classified ads. They have not quit running prostitution classifieds in the print edition; there's a full page of them today.

TV3 is reporting that, at a press conference this morning, Zap said that he would not call an early general election (his term runs out in March 2008), and added that he wanted the PP to help "shoulder the burden." Mr. Zapatero, I think the PP already told you what you'd have to do if you wanted to convince them that you now believed in fighting ETA for real. You've only done one of those things so far, jailing De Juana Chaos. You have a few more policy and personnel changes to make. Rajoy is absolutely right on this issue. He doesn't trust you, and I don't either. You've made so many errors dealing with ETA already.

One thing. If I were Rajoy, my bit of collaboration would be not calling for a new election, on the grounds that terrorism had already succeeded in changing Spain's ruling party once, and taking down the Socialists now would be giving terrorists another success. The responsible thing for the PP to do is just let Zap hang himself. Why give him a push when he'll fall without one?

TV3 is reporting that De Juana has already been arrested and is being sent back to a Madrid prison to serve out his sentence for writing threatening letters. They also say that Arnaldo Otegi will most likely be jailed tomorrow, as he is currently out of prison awaiting the results of his appeal on his conviction for exalting terrorism.

More on ETA: José from Barcepundit has expanded his post of yesterday and put it up on Pajamas Media. The Big Chorizo and Colin Davies have more.

ETA's announcement has been a punch in the gut to the Zap administration. El Periodico's headline today was, "Against the ropes." La Vanguardia calls the announcement "the tipping point" for the administration. Zap went on TV yesterday afternoon and didn't say much, except for his call for support from the other political parties. He was going on again in the evening, but cancelled even though TV1 had been running announcements that Zap would do an interview for several hours.

The PP's terms, as announced by Angel Acebes yesterday, are: Ban ETA front parties PCTV and ANV; fire attorney general Candido Conde Pumpido, an outrageous choice for the position as he used to be an ETA defense lawyer; jail De Juana Chaos and ETA spokesman Arnaldo Otegi. The PP also wants to bring fairly moderate regional nationalists CiU and the PNV into any deal they cut with the PSOE. It looks like Zap is going to give in on the jailings, at least; he is going to turn loose the prosecutors on these guys. Which shows you that Zap was lying the whole time when he said that the soft treatment that De Juana and other ETA prisoners got had nothing to do with any negotiations with ETA. I would demand the head of interior minister Perez Rubalcaba as well.

Judge Grande-Marlaska said he was irritated that Judge Garzon was handling all the ETA cases, and announced that he was opening another case against Otegi for exaltation of terrorism. Again.

And the cops said that ETA has several cells ready for action in Spain, and others in France waiting to cross the border. This is pure wishful thinking optimism about negotiations on Zap's part. ETA's truce, as usual, merely gave them a chance to rearm and reorganize themselves, and Zap did nothing about it. The police must have been telling him what ETA was doing; if they know now that ETA has several cells ready, they must have known that the cells were being organized a long time before this. Zap ignored them.

Francesc-Marc Alvaro, the Vanguardia's best columnist, tears Zap a new one today. He says, "Only the very gullible are surprised at the end of the truce. Unofficially it ended with the Barajas bombing in December. And the signs come from even farther back, from the previous summer. After so many years of activity, ETA has developed a code (of behavior) that experts know how to read: what the gang thinks and what its plans are. Well, the ones who were not being advised by those experts are the Administration, concretely Mr. Rodriguez Zapatero. Or, if he was advised, then he didn't listen, which is even more irresponsible...ETA has taken advantage of such irresponsibility."

Cartoon in Sunday's La Vanguardia: An African woman is preparing what looks like a meager meal for six skinny children; the children are rather unattractive caricatures of black people, with thick lips and jutting jaws. They're sitting on the ground in front of a hut. The woman says, "The US has spent $565 billion on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, 42 times what would be needed to eliminate hunger in the world in 2015." A child replies, "And what are we going to eat in 2015? Crude petroleum?" (Play on words in Spanish; see, "crudo" means both crude and raw. Ha, ha.)

a) Who really thinks that the world's hunger problem could be solved with $15 billion? Where did that figure come from?
b) I don't see Spain or Europe stepping up to do anything about world hunger. The cartoon seems to assume that world hunger is America's responsibility.
c) Iraq and Afghanistan are comparatively cheap wars; see Niall Ferguson in the Wall Street Journal today.
d) The US spends lots of money on defense. This is largely because it's our job to be the world's policeman. It's our job because Europe wimped out. Any European who dislikes the American role as the world's cop needs to immediately call for the quadrupling, at least, of his own country's defense budget.
e) It is a lot easier to get your people to pay taxes for their own benefit than for the benefit of some people in a faraway country who they do not know. This is why your country isn't helpìng Africa out too much, either.
f) Could Africa's situation possibly be Africa's own fault, and if this is true, why is it the United States's job to send money?
g) If Africa's situation is to be blamed on colonialism, where does the US come in, since we never tried to colonize Africa? Shouldn't it be England and France and Belgium paying the bills, not us?
h) For the last time, Afghanistan has nothing to do with oil, and neither does Iraq. Afghanistan has no oil, and Iraq's oil was its problem, because any bandit warlord like Saddam who managed to seize control of the state suddenly had a lot of money to spend on weapons. America does not need Iraq's oil, and even if we did, it's a lot cheaper to buy it than steal it. No American president would ever go to war to grab raw materials, because we have plenty of our own and war is bad for business. The very idea of going to war for raw materials is an 18th century mercantilist concept popular in Latin countries, where economic thinking is very backward.

But left-wing Radio Ser, Spain's least responsible radio network (much worse than Cope, whose lies are limited to Spanish internal politics; Ser regularly lies about the entire world) is running two-page ads in the Spanish press. On the left page, there's what looks like a blurry photo of a violent Baghdad street scene, with the title in large yellow letters, "Weapons? No, petroleum." On the other page there's a photo of the aging, egotistical, and unintelligent radio host Gemma Nierga, a PSOE mouthpiece, who read the manifesto at one of those anti-American rallies they had in 2003.

Looks to me like Radio Ser is advertising that they're going to tell you the lies you want to hear.

Speaking of oh-so-holy do-gooding La Vanguardia, they link from a prominent place on their own website (under the masthead, run your cursor over "Clasificados," and "Contactos" will appear) to this. That is, they're acting as pimps, shilling up clients for prostitutes, some of whom are victims of debt slavery.

Further comments on the ETA announcement: Barcepundit and Notes from Spain.

ETA announced this morning that their so-called truce is over as of midnight tonight, saying that they would "resume activities on all fronts." I guess they mean they're going to kill more people. I had also figured when they blew up the parking garage at Barajas, killing two, that the truce was over then, but ETA must want to make it official. El País reported yeaterday that ETA has an attack plan all ready to go; the TV3 news last night said that ETA had sent another round of extortion letters to Basque businessmen. La Vanguardia says today that both Spanish and French intelligence have warned of a large increase in ETA activity recently.

During ETA's alleged truce, which they announced in March 2006, street terrorism, weapons robberies, extortion, preparation of explosives, and recruitment and training all continued, not to mention the Barajas bombing. Yet the Zap goverment continued negotiations with them. The only negotiations these guys should be allowed into are the ones they make with the prosecutors to get a few years off their sentences if they spill everything. I cannot believe there are still enough idiot people out there who think you can negotiate with other people who are trying to kill you.

ETA claimed that the votes obtained by its front party, the ANV, were support for its claim that the Basque people support them. More stupidity from Zap, who did not use the prosecutors' office to completely close down the ANV as he could have done under the Political Parties Act. It's time for him to do that right now.

Zap's reaction has been to call for all political parties to support him and the government against this "new" ETA threat. Of course I support the rule of law, but it's kind of hard to back Zap now when his naivete has gotten us this far into this mess. If I were the PP I'd demand that Zap fire every single one of his pro-negotiations advisors as proof he has had a real change of heart. All the leaders of the Basque Socialist Party, who have met with ETA secretly during the last three years, need to resign as well.

Meanwhile, hunger-striking mass murderer Iñaki de Juana Chaos is walking around free, leaving his house and going for walks although he is supposedly under house arrest. He is refusing to wear an ankle bracelet to monitor his movements because, he says, he "is not a dog." No, he's much lower than any dog that has ever lived, since dogs don't commit premeditated murder, especially not 25 times. The collar he ought to be wearing is called a noose.

Shakeup in the Madrid Socialist Party after its disastrous losses in both the municipal and regional elections. Mayoral candidate Sebastián, who won a city council seat as first on the Socialist list, resigned and retired from politics, and Zap fired regional candidate Simancas as local party boss. The PSOE was also crushed in Valencia and Murcia, and their regional bosses are refusing to take the blame and resign their positions.

Putin is bluffing. He's holding a weak hand, and if he plays his ace, an energy cutoff to Europe, it's going to hurt Russia much worse than anyone else.

La Vanguardia's Beirut correspondent Tomás Alcoverro, the only Spanish journalist that I am convinced is on the take, says on the 40th anniversary of the Six Days War:
"The State of Israel has consolidated itself at the price of war, destruction, violence, frustration, and the impoverishment of its neighboring peoples, the Palestinian, the Lebanese, and the Iraqi." That is of course from the news pages, not analysis or opinion.

La Vangua also takes advantage of Larry Flynt's offer to pay $1 million to anyone who had sex with a congressman in order to run a nice juicy rehash of all American sex scandals of the last forty years. The story mentions the "hypocrisy of those who stand up as custodians of family values and are so militant against homosexuality and abortion." I could come back with the old line, "Hypocrisy is the price that vice pays to virtue," but I'd rather point out that only about ten or fifteen prominent conservatives have ever been outed as hypocrites, and several of them were clownish TV preachers, not serious elected officials. What about all the rest of those who support family values and oppose legal abortion and gay marriage (virtually nobody is "against homosexuality" in itself anymore)? I can name dozens of them whose names are completely untainted by scandal.

By the way, the Democrats' hypocrisy about money (Edwards and Gore and Hillary Clinton, especially, the first a robber-baron ambulance-chaser, the second the oldest of old money, and the third a snooty upper-middle-class private-school Chicago WASP, but they're all just plain folks) is a good bit more distasteful to me than any sex scandal the Republicans have ever been mixed up in. As far as I can tell, the only prominent non-hypocritical Democrat is Dennis Kucinich, who fortunately for the world has no chance in hell of ever getting elected.

There's an interview in Sunday's Vangua with Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, a traditional anti-American conservative Spaniard. Quotes: "Bush feels completely just as he has a God and believes that because he has this divine mandate any barbarity is permitted." Ridiculous. Bush DOES NOT believe that he has a divine mandate. That's just plain silly. He's a Methodist, not a Shiite.

"Censorship comes from the United States...Someone told me that he was in San Diego, and that the same thing does not happen to Noam Chomsky that happens to students....those who have recorded his speeches listen to them in a locked room. Because the pressure does not come from the government, but from the public, from the other students." What? That makes no sense at all. Any student in San Diego who went around quoting Chomsky would become a campus hero.

"There is a bomber, the Spirit, that can leave the US, bomb Iraq, and return without refueling or landing. What justice is that? The bomber is a terrorist instrument." What pathetic moral equivalence.

Supposedly the Barça wants to buy a club in the US soccer league in order "to increase the number of fans in that country." Hey, the Barça's great and all, but I don't think it has more than about eleven fans in the States, just like I don't think the New York Yankees or the Chicago Bears have more than about eleven fans in Spain.

Barcelona lies between two stinking ditches, the Besós and Llobregat "rivers." La Vangua's Eugenio Madueño called them "threads of liquid shit." They cleaned up one of the ditches, the Besós, and fish will supposedly be able to live in it soon. Took them eight years. Now they're going to try to clean up the Llobregat, which will probably take eighteen. They have €12 million for the job so far, which is not quite what it's going to cost.

It's a long weekend; I forget which holiday it is on Monday, but we don't have to work, so we're going out to the pueblo to enjoy the late spring weather. The sun is shining and the birds would be singing if there were any songbirds in Barcelona. The pigeons are cooing and the parrots are squawking, and that's the best we can do. So, anyway, no updates until Monday evening, as I will be far away from computers.

Big news from right here: The Dia supermarket around the corner, fifty steps from our front door, got robbed this morning. I don't know any more details, but I'm sure the neighborhood will be full of them very soon. Last week down at the Plaza Joanic a bar owner was murdered by a drunken client with a knife, so Gràcia is irritated; they had a big demo and got more than 500 people. The killer was Moroccan, and the demo organizers were careful to stress that their problem wasn't nationality or race, but crime.

Condi Rice came to Madrid yesterday after canceling her last three planned trips. This was greeted with pleasure by the Zap government, who are trying to be both rhetorically anti-American but influential in world affairs at the same time. Zap hasn't gotten a one-on-one meeting with Bush; he's getting the freeze-out from the US administration, which will never forgive him for bailing out of Iraq with no warning. This has actually been a good tactic, since the press is full of stories about Zap's current international semi-isolation, with no more Schroeder or Chirac to hug and kiss. Spain likes to feel important, (note: in both Catalan and Spanish, the adjective "universal" is used to describe a local citizen who foreign people have heard of; for example, Pau Casals is Catalonia's most "universal" musician), and one way to register American displeasure is to treat it as if it isn't.

Condi said Spain's Cuba policy sucks and that its Afghanistan policy blows.

TV3's website reports, "More than 200 people demonstrated yesterday before the United States embassy in Madrid in order to show their rejection of North American (sic) Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The demonstrators, convoked by Amnesty International and several social collectives, protested at what they called 'the chief representative of imperialist barbarity,' and carried signs against the deployment of United States troops in Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. They also demanded the closing of Guantanamo and the abolition of the death penalty."

You also probably heard that Spain, get this, is suing the Odyssey undersea exploration company, claiming that their latest haul came from Spanish waters. Odyssey, of course, says that it came from international waters, and more specifically somewhere off the Scilly Islands. Which last I checked were nowhere near Spain. Odyssey also says that the ship wasn't Spanish, either, but British, and it was carrying all that gold and silver to bribe the Duke of Savoy.

I suppose everybody's heard about the asswipe who exposed people on two continents to TB. What strikes me most wrong about the story is this guy's absolute lack of concern for anybody but himself. I would throw the book at him for illegally entering the country and anything else he did, and I hope he gets his lawyer ass sued off. If I'd been on one of those planes I'd sue him.

Judge Garzón locked up without bail six of the last batch of Islamists they arrested around here. He turned loose the imam, Taufik Cheddadi. Cheddadi was quoted as saying, "The people who kill in the name of our God have nothing to do with our religion." I hope he's being honest, but then why is he associated with all these other people who are seriously mixed up in international terrorism?

Everyone is still going nuts about the little English girl who disappeared in Portugal. Very sad, but other things are happening in the world.

In La Vanguardia, Manuel Trallero blasts TV3 political commentator Xavi Coral for calling the Plataforma per Catalunya a political party that wants to strengthen immigration laws instead of "a racist and xenophobic party." He's right.

Wilco's playing here tonight as part of the Primavera Sound festival, but I'm not interested in any of the other acts and tickets are like eighty euros so I'm not going. The Stones are playing the Estadio Olimpico on June 21, but unless tickets are cheap, which I doubt, I'm staying home.

And Spain plays Latvia tonight in Eurocup qualifying. This is dumb. There should be divisions based on population, with the top level requiring a population of, say, five million. Spain vs. Latvia, or their next opponent, Liechtenstein, is just dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. It's like the Red Sox playing a rookie-league team.

Interesting thing about Liechtenstein that I read somewhere: In the old days a few hundred years ago the Liechtensteins were a German noble family that owned extensive lands in Bohemia and Hungary. They were vassals of the Hapsburgs, and a couple hundred years later they decided to buy a piece of land that they held on their own, independently. So they bought this little mountain valley, which began to be called Liechtenstein because of its rulers. After World War I the Liechtenstein lands in Hungary and Bohemia, no longer part of the Hapsburg Empire, which itself was overthrown, were confiscated. The Liechtensteins were left with their valley. This is one of the few cases in which a country is named for its ruling family rather than vice versa, as if Germany had been named Hohenzollern or Scotland Stuart.

In case you get bored, this long article (I haven't read it all) on voter irrationality and democracy looks very interesting.

I'm sure you've seen reports on the American national spelling bee. Spaniards often don't quite get the idea, since a spelling bee would make little sense in Spanish. Spanish spelling is phonetically regular, with I think three exceptions: the B and V are sometimes confused, as are the "soft" G and J, and since the H is silent it's sometimes used or left off incorrectly at the beginning of a word. In dialects that don't differentiate between the Y and the LL, those are also often confused. For some really bad spelling, check this out.

Something similar they do around here in school is mental arithmetic; another one is dictation.

Barcelona elections fallout: Now local Esquerra leader Jordi Portabella says he's bailing out of the Catalan Tripartite that governs the city, leaving it a Bipartite without an absolute majority. Hereu, as the most voted candidate, will probably have to govern from the minority. I have no idea on whether ERC will pull out of all its deals with the Socialists or not.

La Vangua is reporting there's a shakeup in Esquerra. They were probably the biggest loser in the elections, losing votes on the right to CiU and on the left to the CUP. The smoke-filled room guys seem to have decided that they're nationalists first and leftists second, and that the Tripartite deal they cut with the less nationalist Left has pissed off a lot of their more puritanical voters, who see any compromise with a non-Catalanist party as high treason. Now they're looking to deal with CiU to see what crumbs they can pick up. This sort of shoots down the Socialists' plan for the Tripartite to gang up on CiU, since one-third of it just changed sides.

Supposedly Portabella is trying to grab control of the party apparatus from evil Roveish political machine manipulator Joan Puigcercós.

Pasqual Maragall resigned as president of the Catalan Socialist Party. He wrote an open letter to La Vangua. Nobody cared. (Cue "Eleanor Rigby.")

Rumor has it that Madrid mayor Gallardón wants to run as number two ater Rajoy on the PP list in the general election, which is coming up in about 6-8 months.