I don't understand the do-gooder soft-headed progre peaceniks around here.

This morning the cops busted a fourth Al Qaeda member here in Barcelona; they had already arrested three of them (not two) on Tuesday. These guys were running a cell that recruited jihadis for training camps in North Africa and then sent them on to their martyrdom in Iraq. They are wanted by the Moroccan police, and will probably be extradited.

People, it's right here under our noses. Al Qaeda is operating in Barcelona. It is recruiting people who live here. They then go to Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Lebanon, and blow people up. The six Spanish soldiers killed in Lebanon were probably Al Qaeda victims. The nearly 200 who died on March 11, 2004 were definitely Al Qaeda victims. Why do all politically correct Catalans oppose fighting Al Qaeda on the ground in Iraq, which is where the war on Islamism is going to be won or lost?

Part of me thinks they're so shortsighted that they prefer an Al Qaeda victory to an Anglo-American victory, just because they despise the United States so much.

In Spain, summer officially starts on San Juan, June 24, and not much happens until October or so. This is why there's not much news from around here, which is a good thing.

Former economics minister Rodrigo Rato is going to resign as head of the IMF as of September. The March 11 bombings trial ends on Monday, but the sentence won't be handed down until October. The verdict, of course, is going to be guilty. The Spanish cops arrested a man and a woman in Cadiz for trying to collect a ransom for the missing English girl in Portugal; it looks like the arrestees have nothing to do with the kidnapping. The King and Queen are in China, and the Chinese kindly offered to rent a pair of pandas to the Madrid Zoo. (The renting is fair enough, since it's my understanding that the money goes to protect panda habitats.) Housing prices are rising a lot more slowly than they were a couple of years ago. But they're still rising. Two Spanish players, Rudy Fernandez and Marc Gasol, were chosen in the NBA draft, but I'm not sure either is really NBA quality. Barça signed Eric Abidal, and is now trying to get a center-back; if they can't get Chivu from Roma, they want Gabi Milito from Zaragoza or Andrade from Deportivo. For some reason the Spanish press is covering the Paris Hilton whooptedoo. Why anyone would care, I don't know, especially on this side of the Atlantic. We have enough idiot pseudocelebrities over here already.

I'm currently working on a Spanish sixth-grade social studies text, of which the last three chapters are devoted to history, mostly Spanish and European, between the voyages of discovery and today. Of course I can't mention the company or the title, but I can say that the textbook follows the official curriculum and has been approved by the Ministry of Education.

The text's interpretation of history is rather bizarre.

It doesn't mention the 1492 expulsion of the Jews and Muslims who refused to convert to Catholicism.
It mentions the forced conversions of the Muslims in the caption of a picture; it does not mention the rebellions of the Moriscos, which were brutally crushed and ended with more expulsions.
It doesn't mention the Inquisition or the Counter-Reformation. No one gets burned at the stake in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid, of which there is a large photo.
It mentions the Santa Hermandad, saying it was responsible for "security," but without going into the ugly details.
It fails to speculate that these expulsions and repression might have contributed to the decline of the Spanish Empire.
It does not mention the bloodiness of the Aztecs; it briefly mentions "sacrifice," but not human sacrifice.
Cortex and Pizarro get one sentence between them. War and battle are not mentioned, just "conquest."
It does not mention the great Indian die-off, caused mostly by epidemics but also by Spanish abuse and mistreatment.
It does not mention slavery in Spanish America or the large Spanish participation in the slave trade.
It does not mention the eighty-year Dutch War for Independence.
It does not mention the Spanish Armada and the failed invasion of England.
It blames imperial decline on "famines, epidemics, and wars" without mentioning the many shortcomings of Spanish society and culture.
It does not admit that following the War of the Spanish Succession, Spain was a French satellite state for a century.
It includes a Marxist analysis of the Industrial Revolution, including class struggle between workers and bourgeois; it fails to mention the growth of the salaried middle class, managers and technicians and clerks. Remember Orwell's 1984, in which Winston looks at a history text that includes a drawing of a fat bourgeois dressed in black with a top hat? THIS BOOK ACTUALLY INCLUDES ONE OF THOSE.
It calls the Peninsular War "The War for Independence," but doesn't mention that Spain sided with France until 1808 and saw its fleet destroyed at Trafalgar. It doesn't mention Joseph Bonaparte or the Duke of Wellington.
It doesn't mention the independence of Spanish America, or the wars that it involved. Simon Bolivar is not mentioned.
It doesn't mention the Carlist Wars.
It doesn't mention the Cuban war of independence or the Spanish-American War, which is a little surprising.
It mentions World War I, but doesn't say which countries it was fought between, and it doesn't mention the Russian Revolution. In fact, the word "Communism" does not appear.
World War II receives the same treatment; only Hiroshima and the Holocaust are mentioned. Adolf Hitler is not mentioned. Neither are Lenin and Stalin.
The Spanish Civil War gets four pro-Republican paragraphs. The killings behind the lines on both sides are not mentioned.
The Franco regime gets four paragraphs.
"Inequality in the 20th Century" gets two pages, including the code words "society of consumption," "social inequality," and "ecological problems."
"The European Union" gets two pages, too.

Interesting to compare this version of national history with that taught in American schools, which is all about the rights of minority groups and women, and how mean white men were to Indians, blacks, women, Chinese, Japanese, and people of alternative sexuality.

TV3 is reporting that two Al Qaeda operatives were arrested in Barcelona this morning. They're Moroccans and recruiters for jihadi volunteers; their network sends recruits to training camps in the Sahara and then on to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Spain passed the United States in the list of the world's top cocaine users. 3% of Spaniards have used cocaine within the past year, and it's 7% of high school students. In the EU as a whole, less than 1% of persons used cocaine. One in five European cocaine users is Spanish. This sounds to me like a problem. Hypothesis: As Richard Pryor, I think, said, "Cocaine is God's way of telling you that you have too much money." There's lots of cash floating around in Spain.

There's an insect plague in southern and western Catalonia, some kind of tiny little black fly whose bite hurts like hell. The Generalitat is going to spend half a million euros fumigating the creeks and streams where it breeds. Sounds like something useful to do with our tax money.

Barça signed Yaya Toure, who is supposed to be a hell of a good defensive midfielder. He will replace Edmilson, and maybe Marquez as well. They announced today that Motta is definitely out, along with Saviola, of course.

Amnesty International issued one of its tendentious reports saying that 102 countries practiced torture. So of course TV3's report paid attention only to Amnesty's charges against the United States. As usual. By the way, Amnesty says it's all America's fault because we have "legitimized the use of torture," which obviously had a great deal of influence over the behavior of North Korea, Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda, who would never, never have tortured anyone if there weren't a prison camp at Guantanamo where a few hundred very dangerous people are held.

I suppose you saw that Cameron Diaz was criticized in Peru for carrying a bag with a Maoist red star and a quote from Chairman Mao. Peruvians in general don't much like Maoists, since Shining Path killed quite a few people in the name of Mao. What I want to know is why Cameron Diaz would think that wearing Communist symbols, including the infamous Che T-shirt, is cool. I'm sure she knows that wearing a swastika T-shirt would get her well-deserved public scorn. I don't see a difference between the two, myself, though the Che T-shirts are useful as they show at a glance that a person is too ignorant for you to waste your time with.

Current big political stink: They're trying to decide what route the high-speed train (AVE) will take below Barcelona between Sants and Sagrera stations. One proposal runs close to the Sagrada Familia, and a hoohaw is being made about the vibrations causing the thing to fall down or something. I doubt it; lots of subway and train tunnels have been dug under lots of cities, and Notre Dame and Saint Paul's haven't collapsed yet. Hell, the blue line of the subway already runs right under the Sagrada Familia. Also, if all the new construction they're doing collapses, I'll be more than happy anyway, since it's ugly as hell. They should have stopped building when Gaudi died and just left it.

Oh, yeah, I read somewhere that the Sagrada Familia does not have a municipal building permit, and apparently never had one. This does sound like something that ought to be worked out just for the sake of coherence.

Let's do another blog roundup, since it's been at least a week.

Notes from Spain has an interesting series up of several posts by guestbloggers, all folks who write in English from Spain. Check it out.

Observing Hermann has news on the Tom Cruise-Scientology-Germany thing; by the way, Drudge reported it wrong yesterday. The German military said it would ban Cruise from filming at military sites, but the country of Germany itself did not, and probably cannot, ban Cruise from making a movie there.

Robert Duncan reruns a 2003 piece on the confusing Spanish Gas Natural-Endesa corporate-government brawl in which regional nationalism raised its head as usual.

Roncesvalles reports on thug street violence in Germany, with photos.

Samizdata features a fine piece of verse on the silly new sporran law.

South of Watford comments from the left on the deaths of the six soldiers in Lebanon. Spanish Pundit has more from the right, including photos.

The Dissident Frogman flays French government and politics in general.

A Fistful of Euros reports that a wacky German Holocaust denier who was sentenced to prison is getting support from the flaky American extreme right. Sounds like they deserve one another. Reminder to AFOE: These nutballs have little to no influence on American opinion. Nobody pays any attention to them.

The Brussels Journal, meanwhile, has a completely different story; they say that the wacky guy is not a Holocaust denier, but an anti-abortion activist, who compared abortion with the Holocaust. That's a rather different kettle of fish, methinks, well within the bounds of free speech and not Holocaust denial at all. The BJ says that a lot of this guy's supporters are European, not just American.

Colin Davies, as always, is full of information about Spain; today it's politics.

Davids Medienkritik links to a criticism of German media exploitation of Guantanamo.

Eursoc has an extensive rundown, from the sceptical position, of the EU treaty agreement or whatever it is.

Fausta has more on Correa and Morales, part of the Axis of Evel Knievel along with Chavez and Castro.

La Liga Loca names his all-star Spanish League team; only Messi and Iniesta from the Barça make it, which seems about right to me. Only questionable choice: Poulsen instead of Albelda or Xavi.

LA-Madrid Files points out what's wrong with the Spanish movie industry: It makes crappy movies.

National Review links to a Real Clear Politics article speculating on "The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers," specifically China and maybe Russia. Not for a good long while, I don't think, and the author seems to agree:

But the most important factor remains the United States. For all the criticism leveled against it, the United States -- and its alliance with Europe -- stands as the single most important hope for the future of liberal democracy. Despite its problems and weaknesses, the United States still commands a global position of strength and is likely to retain it even as the authoritarian capitalist powers grow. Not only are its GDP and productivity growth rate the highest in the developed world, but as an immigrant country with about one-fourth the population density of both the European Union and China and one-tenth of that of Japan and India, the United States still has considerable potential to grow -- both economically and in terms of population -- whereas those others are all experiencing aging and, ultimately, shrinking populations. China's economic growth rate is among the highest in the world, and given the country's huge population and still low levels of development, such growth harbors the most radical potential for change in global power relations. But even if China's superior growth rate persists and its GDP surpasses that of the United States by the 2020s, as is often forecast, China will still have just over one-third of the United States' wealth per capita and, hence, considerably less economic and military power. Closing that far more challenging gap with the developed world would take several more decades.

The article includes a vital point about 20th-century history that most European analysts sort of skip over:

Throughout the twentieth century, the United States' power consistently surpassed that of the next two strongest states combined, and this decisively tilted the global balance of power in favor of whichever side Washington was on. If any factor gave the liberal democracies their edge, it was above all the existence of the United States rather than any inherent advantage. In fact, had it not been for the United States, liberal democracy may well have lost the great struggles of the twentieth century. This is a sobering thought that is often overlooked in studies of the spread of democracy in the twentieth century, and it makes the world today appear much more contingent and tenuous than linear theories of development suggest.

Definitely go check it out.

As you probably know, six Spanish soldiers on the UN peacekeeping mission in south Lebanon were killed in a bomb attack on their convoy. Three more soldiers were wounded. It was a car bomb loaded with 50 kilos of explosives triggered at a distance. The Spanish convoy was not outfitted with "frequency inhibitors," which can prevent remote controls from functioning. Spain has about 1100 troops in Lebanon.

Defense minister Alonso declared that yes, it was a terrorist attack, but he doesn't think Hezbollah did it. Well, who else would have done it? Rajoy told Zap that he'd sent Spanish troops into combat areas and should stop bragging about being a pacifist.

Three of the soldiers were Colombians. About 7500 of the Spanish military's 85,000 troops are Latin Americans; the quota is a maximum of 9%. In 2006, the US military had about 69,000 foreign citizens serving, about 5%, with the largest contingents from Mexico and the Philippines. Less complaining from the international Left that the US is recruiting foreign "mercenaries," please.

La Vanguardia's Beirut correspondent Tomás Alcoverro, who I believe to be on somebody's payroll, calls for UN forces to get out of Lebanon, and especially for Spanish troops to get out, apparently because he thinks those who live there should be left to kill one another. He blames the whole thing on the Lebanese government and on American support for it, though he doesn't bother mentioning the actual killers.

Thanks to the members of Spain's armed forces for their sacrifice, and condolences to the families of the dead soldiers.

I honestly don't know what to think about the European Union summit; La Vanguardia is reporting they made a deal, that the Poles managed to get the reallocation of power delayed until 2017, and that France is claiming victory because they got a light version of the rejected Constitution of 2005 through. Apparently there will be "more foreign policy and law enforcement cooperation," but the document will not be a constitution and certain limits, unspecified by La Vangua, will exist. It's still not a done deal, as there will be referendums in Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. I bet the Dutch, Danes, and Czechs vote no. Zap and Moratinos are trying to take the credit and talk up how important their participation in the discussions was. Guys, if you have to go around telling people you're important, you probably ain't.

Hugo Chavez update: He's buying nine submarines, armed with anti-aircraft missiles, off the Russians. Just what the Venezuelan people need. Uh, Hugo, Russian subs have a rather disappointing track record, tending to sink. He's also bought attack helicopters, fighter planes, and air-to-air missiles from our friend Putin. France refused to sell subs to him, a first for the French, notorious for arming pretty much everybody and his dog. Meanwhile, you've heard that he's opening up a Kalashnikov factory in order to arm every bunch of nuts with a grudge throughout Latin America.

La Vanguardia reports that Spanish farmers and ranchers, mostly small landholders who emigrated to Venezuela in the 50s and 60s, are being forced off their land by gangs of Chavista thugs who claim they are taking over the land to create alleged cooperatives. They then collect government subsidies and do no work, so nothing is produced. 16,000 farm cooperatives have been created in Venezuela; only 200 have not gone broke already. There's been a wave of kidnappings for ransom, 30 in the last 18 months, which the Spanish farmers consider to be government intimidation.

Says La Vangua's reporter Joaquim Ibarz: "The result is the asme as in an African country: lack of investment, decline of production, fear, crime, impunity, poverty, and chaos." He visited a Caracas supermarket and found no sugar, meat, eggs, milk, cooking oil, or beans on the shelves. "Scarcity increases because productive land is invaded by people without experience and ranchers and farmers do not invest for fear their land will be expropriated. The control of food prices leads to scarcity, as the government forces food to be sold for less than the cost of production." I'm a little surprised at La Vangua printing anything so liberal-capitalist; let's hope it's a trend.

Congratulations to Sevilla, who had the best season of all the Spanish football clubs: they won the European Supercup against Barcelona, their second consecutive UEFA Cup against Espanyol, and the Spanish Cup against Getafe. They finished third in the league, winning a Champions League spot for next year, and were only two points off winners Real Madrid. These guys are a professional team with no big superstars that plays good football, and they've had a season to remember. Hope they don't lose many of their good players to bigger teams.

Some guy from England had a very good idea: he's going to pay a few million quid to buy second-division Malaga. Now all he has to do is invest twenty million more in players and he's got a Spanish First Division team, with all the money that's worth. And Malaga is by far the most desirable market with no First Division team, with 600,000 in the city and a million more along the Costa del Sol; also, it doesn't have another historic club that you'd be competing against. The other smart thing some genius ought to do is buy the Ciudad de Murcia second-division club, which is selling its spot in Division Two. Then move the club to Madrid and spend twenty million on players to get up to First Division, and you've got a team in Europe's third-biggest city.

Political speculation: If the PP gets the same results in the upcoming general election that it got in the municipals, it will be strengthened in such important areas as Madrid, Valencia, Cadiz, Malaga, and the Balearics. The Socialists only gained strength in a couple of out-of-the-way places like Cuenca and Orense. This shift in the vote in dynamic, growing areas is likely to give the PP a relative majority. Sun Belt hypothesis for Spain's booming Mediterranean coast, anyone?

Al Gore and his traveling circus sideshow are in town again doing the global warming shtick. He said if Greenland melts his 16-room house will be under water, or something like that. Of possible interest to Americans: Al introduced himself as "the next President of the United States." Now an Al-Hillary-Obama three-way would be really fun...wait, I didn't mean that, I meant a presidential campaign with three contenders...He drew an audience of 1500, which is probably better than he'd do in Kansas City, as part of the First International Meeting of the Friends of Trees. I shit you not. The Friends of Trees.

Today is San Juan, so last night was firecrackers night and all the kids in town blew their little fingers off, I hope.

La Vanguardia runs an entire page of anti-Israeli bigotry by a photographer named Bru Rovira, who blames Israel for the Hamas-Fatah civil war. Just a few pearls: "The jailers have no desire to find a just solution...the occupier's main strategy is dehumanization...the repression of the Israeli army...where are the schools and the hospitals?...the Jewish and democratic (sic) state...half of the Palestinian population was expelled by the Israeli army...a war with intolerable massacres...Israel imposed and Arafat protested, shouted, and signed...the most brutal episodes began...extrajudicial executions...the massacre at Jenin, completely leveled by the army and the bulldozers. An undetermined number of civilians died...the complete suffocation of the economy and political system."

TV3 is reporting that Barça has signed Thierry Henry from Arsenal for €24 million. I'm not sure how good a move this is--he's probably got a couple more good years in him, we hope, but who knows? Also, somebody is going to have to sit down, and that somebody is most likely Samuel Eto'o, who is not going to be happy with this. Oh, well, Barça has four forwards for three spots now, and when one of them gets hurt they'll have someone to cover for him. They were hoping Gudjohnsen would be that guy last year, as Larsson had been the year before, but that didn't happen.

Meanwhile, an Euromed fast train derailed in El Prat, fortunately with nobody on board, and this has blocked the train line to the airport and to Sitges until Monday. This is ridiculous. Renfe, the Spanish railroad monopoly, is clearly not getting the job done in the Barcelona area, where the commuter trains are constantly late or cancelled. Privatization, anyone?

The story on the ETA car loaded with explosives in Huelva: Seems that they had a scout car running ahead of the explosives car, and the scout car ran into a police checkpoint and alerted the terrorists behind them who were transporting the explosives, who abandoned their car at the side of the road. The Spanish cops are positive that ETA has an operatiive cell in Andalusia.

Tony Blair is going to convert to Catholicism, as everybody had speculated. Good for him, I hope he's happy, but is this actually a big deal? One thing about Blair: I still think he was wrong on all the small stuff and right on most of the big stuff. I think the fact that he is sincerely religious helps to show that he thought he was doing the right thing on the Iraq war. Which we still have to win.

The Poles are standing firm and they're going to block the Franco-German proposal for a new EU treaty. Sarko and Merkel have convinced the Brits, but the Czechs and Dutch are still with the Poles. Theory: The Poles don't trust either the Germans or the Russians any farther than they can spit, and neither do the Czechs. I sure wouldn't.

Under pressure to close down Guantanamo, the Bush administration says it might ship the prisoners to Afghanistan. Sounds good to me; I don't care where those arms-bearing terrorists are locked up, as long as they can't escape.

The CIA is releasing "unflattering documents" that had formerly been classified; looks like the worst stuff they can find are assassination attempts on Castro and surveillance of a few reporters. Unpleasant and wrong--I mean the spying on reporters, not trying to knock off Castro, which sounds like a good idea to me--but come on, folks, it's not precisely as bad as what the KGB was up to in those days.

Everyone is reporting that a Generalitat study says that Catalan, with 9 million speakers, including me, is the 88th most spoken language in the world. All right! We're number 88! Ahead of Swedish and Bulgarian!

Arts and Letters Daily links to a TCS interview with Bryan Caplan; we linked to a longish article by him on the same subject a few days ago. Caplan's thesis is that voters often make irrational decisions, especially regarding free markets, and that sometimes the voters should not get what they want. Check it out.

I knew I'd seen Caplan's name before and here's where: a few years ago he wrote a fascinating article titled "The Anarcho-Statists of Spain," one of the best pieces I've ever seen on the Spanish Civil War.

I've always thought that Gandhi, King, and Mandela, the multiculturalists' holy trinity, were highly overrated. Their chief virtues were their bravery--it takes some guts to stand up against the authorities when you're a member of what they consider an inferior group--and Gandhi's and King's non-violence. Mandela, notoriously, approved of violence.

However, none of the three was particularly altruistic--each worked toward the benefit of his own people, just like any other nationalist does. We're not talking Wilberforce or Henry Ward Beecher, members of the dominant group who worked for the rights of the dominated group. Or Lyndon Johnson and Earl Warren, who did much more to put an end to Jim Crow than King did. Johnson rammed literally dozens of civil rights laws down Congress's throat, and Chief Justice Warren backed him all the way. Or Eisenhower; when Little Rock tried to defy the Supreme Court and maintain segregated schools, Ike sent in the Airborne and Arkansas got the idea that things had changed.

Also, working against a system that does bad things does not necessarily make you a good person. Look at the Communists around the world. Sure, here in Spain they opposed Franco, and Franco was a bad guy, but the Communists were just as bad and might have been even worse. We're not talking about a democratic opposition or intellectual dissidents here.

Finally, Gandhi, King, and Mandela were fighting British imperialism, American Jim Crow, and South African apartheid, respectively. All bad things, I will agree, and they are all happily long gone. But these three men were dealing with more or less civilized opponents, who shrank from using extreme violence and repression. None of them would have lasted five minutes under Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro, Ho, Kim, or Saddam. Or even such comparatively mild dictators as Mubarak, Pinochet, or the king of Morocco.

Quick news brief: The cops found an ETA car with 100 kilos of explosives and detonators in Huelva province. It was not set to explode; presumably, the explosives and detonators would have been used to make several bombs.

A Madrid judge declared the Latin Kings an illegal organization. In Catalonia, though, they're an officially recognized cultural group that gets subsidies from the regional government.

A big kerfuffle is being made over the negotiations on Germany's proposed lite EU treaty. Spaniards, who are real big on the EU because it gives Spain lots of money and because a lot of them trust European bureaucrats more than Spanish politicians, hope that opposition from the UK and Poland will fail. Don't be so sure. I don't think many of the EU states are going to want to give up much more power to Brussels. France and Holland already voted no, remember, and no British government is going to give up its control over the currency or its own foreign and defense policy.

Puyol popped a ligament at an exhibition game in South Africa and will be out for three months, which is probably not such a bad thing because he needs the rest. Oh, get this, the Barça players were invited to meet Nelson Mandela and only five showed up. Garments are being rent over the squad's lack of solidarity.

From Wikipedia:

In 1961, Mandela became the leader of the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (translated as Spear of the Nation, also abbreviated as MK), which he co-founded. He co-ordinated a sabotage campaign against military and government targets, and made plans for a possible guerrilla war if sabotage failed to end apartheid. A few decades later, MK did indeed wage a guerrilla war against the regime, especially during the 1980s, in which many civilians were killed. Mandela also raised funds for MK abroad, and arranged for paramilitary training, visiting various African governments.

What a disgrace. In Austin, Texas, a lynch mob killed a passenger in a car that hit a child, who was slightly injured. There aren't many details, fortunately, but it seems that the crowd surrounded the car and beat the passenger to death.

This would be getting a lot more press if it were a white lynch mob killing a black man, but in this case it was a black lynch mob killing a Hispanic man.

Now let's see what law enforcement does.

It's been a long time since we did a blog roundup. So let's do one.

A Fistful of Euros has a good, long piece on European demographics in response to an article in the Economist. Check it out.

Biased BBC reports on the internal BBC study that determined the network is indeed biased.

Colin Davies has more groovy stuff on Gallego politics and fiestas and weather.

Ray comes out of the closet at Davids Medienkritik! Congratulations!

Eursoc comments on the French legislative election.

Expat Yank slaps around pro-Argie Brits.

Guirilandia has the dope on Barcelona street scams (with video) and deviant sexuality. Notes from Spain features more deviancy.

Kaleboel warns us that Spanish vultures have invaded Holland, with video.

La Liga Loca has the first half of his report on the Spanish football weekend up. Nicholas Mead has more.

LA-Madrid Files demolishes a self-hating Yank.

Spanish Pundit has more on Spain, the EU, Cuba, and Palestine.

I thought this was funny. I'm mother-in-law sitting, and I put on my Pogues greatest hits CD. My mother-in-law asked, "Isn't the singer really old?" Well, yes, his body probably had about 80 years on it by the time this stuff was recorded, and probably has 80 more on it now, making him 160 in Shane years. I remember once he claimed he had been drunk since the age of thirteen. Not that he'd been drinking, that he'd been drunk.

She actually doesn't care what kind of music I play, though she seems to prefer swing and standards. She'll tolerate the Ramones, though.

The political news around here is that the Convergència i Unió coalition may break up. CiU is moderate-conservative and Catalan nationalist, and they're the second-biggest vote-getters in Catalonia. Convergencia is the more moderate and more Catalanist of the two parties, and Unio is more conservative and less Catalanist; Unio is part of the European Christian Democrats.

A lot of people think that Convergencia was basically Jordi Pujol's personalist party, and that it will fragment into at least three groups, one aligning with ERC, one with the PP, and the third with Unio. Pretty much the only things that ever held this lot together were Pujol and the fact they all hate the Catalan Socialists.

There's a conflict on between Convergencia leader Mas and Unio leader Duran Lerida; both want to be the overall boss of the coalition. In addition, Convergencia would prefer to center on the region of Catalonia; they hope to cut a deal with the Socialists in Madrid, putting Mas in as Catalan premier. In exchange for backing Zap in the Congress of Deputies, Montilla would step down at the Generalitat. Unio would prefer to focus on Spain and gain a couple of ministries in a Zap cabinet, a nice juicy one for Duran Lerida.

Note: Both Convergencia and Unio are counting a few chickens before they hatch. General elections are coming up in January or February, and both C's and U's plans are based on doing well. If they do badly, they won't be in a position to cut any deals, and especially not if Zap gets beat by Rajoy, which might happen. Or if Zap takes an absolute majority, less likely but still possible.

Also, if CiU breaks up, they'll divide the moderate nationalist vote and dilute its strength, making it even less likely that they'd be in a position to cut a deal with anyone.

Soap opera in France. Segolene Royal and François Hollande have split up sentimentally and politically. Now they're going to fight it out for Socialist leadership. He wants to stay in till 2008, and she wants him out now. This is great. How much you want to bet that if Hillary doesn't become president in 2008, she divorces Bill in 2009? Meanwhile, Sarko's UMP comfortably won the second round of the legislative election last weekend, though they actually lost about fifteen seats. He will have no problems putting through whatever legislation he wants.

EU weaseliness: The EU's foreign ministers voted to "reopen an open and general dialogue" with Cuba, at the request of Zap and Moratinos. I despise Zap, but I'd dislike him less if he weren't so pro-Castro. I don't get it; I don't see what he has to gain by backing a Communist dictatorship. All I can figure out is that he must actually like Castroism and believe in the Revolution. What a dope. The Zap regime also introduced a proposal to, get this, lift the diplomatic sanctions the EU laid on Cuba after the 2003 roundup of dissidents. The dissidents have not been freed, by the way. The UK, Sweden, and the Czechs, to those countries' credit, blocked that bit of groveling; the Czechs wanted to slap heavier sanctions on Cuba.

The Boys of the Squad, our regional police force, is supposedly tracking down three Islamist cells in Catalonia. Two of them recruit jihadis to go commit terrorism in Iraq, and the other falsifies documents in order to get Pakistani Al Qaeda prospects into Spain. I'm not sure they should have announced this until they'd actually captured these guys.

Rumors: Barça may unload Rafael Márquez as well as the other eight guys who are definitely out. La Vanguardia says they want to sign Eric Abidal, fullback at Olympique Lyon; Yaya Touré, midfielder at Monaco; center-back Chivu at Roma; and Thierry Henry. Supposedly they want to buy Diego Forlán; that rumor's been around for a while. I would not sell Marquez, he's young and has upside though he had a poor season, and I wouldn't spend a lot of money on Henry, he's only got about one more year left. Gudjohnsen supposedly has an offer from Man United. Saviola's pissed off, and he's claiming he might go to Real Madrid. Ronaldinho and Eto'o are staying, says the club. Deco was not mentioned. Frank says he's going to be a tough disciplinarian next season. Everybody seems to agree that there was not enough discipline last season, and that's why they blew the title. Sounds like a simplification to me, but I'm all for being a hardass on the players. If I were paying these guys millions of euros, you can guarantee there'd be clauses in their contracts specifying no doing anything the slightest bit unhealthy.

Nobody in Spain was talking about anything but football today. The League championship was down to the last game. If Real Madrid won, they won the league; if they didn't, then Barça could take the title with a victory. The games were played simultaneously, and Barça got out to an early lead over Nastic while Mallorca took the lead over Real Madrid. For about sixty minutes it looked like the title was Barcelona's, and then Madrid scored, and scored, and scored again, and they won the league fair and square. There is no way Barcelona should ever have let this one get away, they had a lead of several points with just a few games to go, but they did. You can't win them all, but this was one they shouldn't have lost.

The papers are saying no big shakeup of the Barça squad. Rijkaard will stay, and so will Ronaldinho and Eto'o. On their way out: Motta, Sylvinho, Edmilson, Belletti, Gudjohnsen, Giuly, Ezquerro, and Saviola. Supposedly they're going to sign Chivu; this rumor is a little solider than others I've heard because it was in La Vanguardia and not one of the notoriously unreliable sports papers.

I noticed something down at the bar this evening, since of course the game was on pay-TV. The place I go is frequented by working-class guys who are perfectly OK but not too refined or well-educated or anything like that, and none is particularly good-looking. However, three of them have recently scored with fairly attractive chicks who they normally wouldn't have a chance with, and they were all there for the big game tonight.

All three of these girls are Eastern European, and a Spanish working-class guy with a steady job looks pretty good to them. So there's one social result of immigration: it has improved the sex lives of at least a few of the locals no end. I'm guessing that Asian, Latin American, Arab, and African girls tend to stick with their own folks, but the Eastern Europeans, who I'm guessing are often more mature and self-reliant and came here on their own, aren't so locked into their own communities. I'm also guessing that Spanish guys are much more likely to hit on white women than those of other races.

On the exclusion of writers in Spanish from the Catalan delegation at the Frankfurt Book Fair:

Josep Bargalló, extremist Cataloony and head of the Institut Ramon Llull, in charge of this shindig which is costing all Spanish taxpayers €12 million from the Ministry of Culture, said in the regional Parliament on March 7, "The protagonists will be the writers who express themselves in Catalan; if we invite them, the authors in Spanish will come only for the dialogues and to talk about Catalan literature...We want to explain our reality as it is and, yes, we are plurilingual, but what makes us different from others is the Catalan language; without it there would be no Catalan culture in Frankfurt."

From La Vanguardia on May 6, 2007: "Until a week and a half ago, the principal Catalan authors in Spanish had not received an official invitation from the Generalitat to go to Frankfurt."

Quimera has an excellent summary of the whole kerfuffle, reminding us that on May 26, 2006, the Catalan Parliament passed a confusing resolution; "CiU and ERC were completely convinced they had agreed to the absence of Spanish at the fair. The press interpreted it that way as well. PSC and ICV understood, however, that they had agreed to give preponderance to Catalan without excluding Spanish. But from the text of the parliamentary resolution, according to which Catalan was "the unique identifying characteristic" of Catalan literature, it was difficult to deduce anything but the exclusion of authors in Spanish."

Extremely obnoxious snobbery from yesterday's El Periódico: Woody Allen is in town making preparations for his next movie, which is to be filmed here. Now, though I haven't liked any Allen movies since Annie Hall, and I can't stand the man personally, I admit this is news, and that a visit from Woody would get coverage in any city that he was going to film in. The local press has gone nuts, though, reporting on Allen's every movement in Barcelona, and Arturo San Agustín wonders in his column whether the excessive attention lavished on Allen is a sign that Barcelona is more provincial than it would like to believe.

So far so good; that's actually not a bad topìc for a throwaway column.

Now check out San Agustín's last sentence:

"Woody Allen (is) a director who some of us Europeans like more than the numerous fat Yankees who come here on cruise ships."

What a dick.

CNN reports on bullfighter José Tomás's comeback corrida in Barcelona, which has sold out the Monumental bullring, which seats 19,000. The local press is reporting that thousands of out-of-town aficionados are paying scalpers up to €600 for a seat.

This is controversial around here because Catalan nationalists consider bullfighting to be non-Catalan, a foreign import. That's not true; Barcelona has held bullfights for centuries, had three bullrings operating in the early 1900s before heavy migration from the rest of Spain, and in 1835 saw a local revolt touched off by a bullfight gone wrong. In addition, bullfighting is popular in the town of Olot and in the Catalan towns on the Ebro.

It is true, though, that bullfighting is not as popular in Catalonia as in other parts of Spain. Andalusia and Castile are the heartland of bullfighting, but it's also popular in the Basque Country, Navarre, Aragon, and Valencia. As far as I know, the only Latin American countries where bullfighting is big are Mexico, Colombia, and Peru.

One thing is that it's not considered a sport, but rather a performance. Those who appreciate it consider it an art. I am not one of them.

I've changed my position on bullfighting at least twice. At first I thought it was barbaric and repulsive. Then I began to think that, well, I don't like it but it is part of the culture and has a long history, and who am I to tell Spaniards what to do? Now I've sort of gone back to my original idea. Just because it's part of the culture doesn't make it right, but so many people like it that you really can't ban it, that would be a miscarriage of democracy. But people should damn sure stop patronizing it unless they stop killing the bulls. The Portuguese don't kill the bull. Seems to me that doing it Portuguese-style would be a reasonable compromise.