The big political news, which is actually of little importance, is that Zap lost the first vote to be seated as prime minister because he didn't get an absolute majority; only the PSOE deputies voted for him. So what: they'll take another vote on Friday, and this time it's first-past-the-post, which means Zap has to wait two more days.

Rajoy promised to make nice and cooperate on issues of state such as terrorism, which is considerably more responsible than the PP's attitude during much of Zap's first term.

Zap promised to make an official report of the "balanzas fiscales," the amount of money transferred from Catalonia (and the other regions) to the central government in taxes, and the amount of tax money spent in Catalonia (and other regions) by the central government. This is something that the Catalanists have been demanding for years.

On the one hand, it makes complete sense to me that the maximum possible information about tax collection and government spending should be made public, because the public pays the taxes. So I'm in favor.

On the other hand, this demand has always been based on faulty logic: regions don't pay taxes, individuals do. Since Catalonia is a richer-than-average region, the average Catalan pays more taxes than the average Spaniard. Duh.

As for the argument that not enough tax money is spent in Catalonia, okay, that's fair enough. You can make that case. But if that's what you're arguing for, more pork-barrel spending, then just be honest enough to admit it.

And as for the Catalan infrastructural collapse, how much of that is the fault of not enough central government spending, and how much of it is the fault of incompetence by the regional and municipal governments, and irresponsible behavior by certain political parties?

By the way, in the United States this is not an issue. Some states pay out more than they get back, and some states pay out less. Makes sense, right? Half pay out more, half pay out less. Law of averages and all that. Nobody complains about it.

Zap also came out in favor of a Rhone River-Barcelona aqueduct. Somebody should have been working on this ten years ago.

He also promised:

1) a €400 tax refund
2) more public housing
3) to retrain construction workers
4) to help families pay their mortgages
5) more government R&D spending
6) more infrastructure spending
7) to reform the inheritance tax
8) to raise the minimum wage to €800 a month
9) to raise retirement pensions
10) to spend €1.2 billion helping families with dependents (disabled, senile, retarded, etc.)
11) extend paternity leave from 2 to 4 weeks
12) preschool for all children between ages 0 and 3

1 and 7 are reasonable. 6 is not a bad idea if what's to be built is useful, like transport and utilities, but not if it's more big ugly empty buildings (see: Forum). I'm in favor of 9 and 10, since I favor helping out the weakest among us. 12 seems awfully ambitious. You know all the arguments for and against 8. 3 is a complete boondoggle: all job training money is wasted, at least here in Spain.

They're investigating another possible mad-cow death in Alicante. The authorities say there's no danger of an epidemic, and that the victims must have been infected years ago before the regulations were changed. This is exactly the kind of thing we just have to trust the government on. That's what I like about democracy: I have a lot more trust in a government responsible to us than one responsible to nobody. This is Spain, Western Europe, the institutions are more or less honest. If we were in, say, China, I wouldn't believe a word.

Speaking of covering up the truth: Xavier Sala i Martin, the Columbia econ prof and Barça club executive, declared that some players who have not been playing recently are not injured, as the club had announced, but rather benched. He added that the players in question are those who go out at night. This presumably means Ronaldinho and Deco. I don't think it means Messi, I think he's legitimately hurt, and he's expressed a willingness to clean up his act. Meanwhile, Barça plays Schalke tonight in the second leg of their Champions' League semi-final. If they get eliminated the season's basically over, and that might happen if they play the way they did against Getafe. By the way, I watched the Liverpool-Arsenal game last night, and Barça's not as good as either of those teams.

Another judicial screwup: A judge in Andalusia left a man in jail for a year after he had been acquitted of all charges. Sheer incompetence.

The business bankruptcy rate is up nearly 75% in Spain in the first quarter of 2008 over last year. Half of the bankruptcies are in the construction sector. The Expofincas real-estate agency, €23 million in debt, suspended payments yesterday; it's the first big real-estate company to go to the wall.

So La Vanguardia got an interview with the Hispanic (specifically Dominican-American) author, Junot Díaz, who won this year's Pulitzer for best novel. This guy isn't precisely a poet from the mean streets of the barrio: he's a literature prof at MIT.

Diaz says, "Every time I meet writers from Latin America I laugh, because most of them are white and rich. If they are representatives of our culture, I say, come on. When I travel to Colombia or Venezuela or Cuba most of the people don't look white, but when you meet their writers, every little one of them is bourgeois and extremely white. There is a disconnection between the people and the writers which we have to improve. In any country you name, Peru, Colombia, look for a group of writers from that country, and I'll get together a group of Latins in the United States, and you'll realize that there is much more diversity among Latin writers in the United States than among writers in any other country."

So far so good, right? American society makes it possible for poor Hispanic immigrants to grow up to be writers and professors, something not possible for poor citizens of some Latin American countries.

But Díaz also says, "You can't choose your colonial language. This is a punishment. Mine is English. I learned to read in English. That's why I write in English mixed with Spanish."

Wait a minute. Colonial language? Dude, your parents immigrated from the Dominican and brought you with them when you were nine years old. The American public schools taught you to read and write at the taxpayers' expense. I don't think you can say that English has colonized you if you grew up in New Jersey, especially after you've joined the American upper-middle class, with whom you speak English.

He continues, "I don't know if this prize (will help Latino literature in the US) because you know what the gringos (sic) are like. Although they praise you today, tomorrow they mistreat you like an animal."

Yeah, you know what the spicks are like. Although they feed from your hand today, tomorrow they bite you on that very same hand.

On the University of Kansas chant "Rock Chalk Jayhawk": Supposedly, "rock chalk" refers to the kind of stone that makes up the rather grandly named Mount Oread, the hill the university is built on top of. And let me tell you, in the winter the freezing north wind blows like hell up there. As the lame joke goes, there's nothing between Kansas and the North Pole but a barbed-wire fence, and that's down. I've never been anywhere where I felt colder.

One reason I always thought the chant was dumb is that the words don't even rhyme. It wasn't until I took phonetics that I figured out that it didn't rhyme in my accent, but it does in many other American accents. See, many Americans would pronounce it "Rock Chock Jayhock," with all the words rhyming. I pronounce "chalk" with the L sound, though, and I pronounce "hawk" with an AW sound, as in "saw" or "caught," rather than an AH sound as in "father" or "cot."

Big media news today: Zap made his pre-inaugural speech in Congress; he didn't say anything new or different in an hour and a quarter, except that there will be "no water restrictions" in Catalonia this summer. Zap, I think that's up to God, or Neptune, or Ra, not you, at least as far as whether it's going to rain or not.

He is going to work toward "a climate of mutual respect" with the United States. Sorry, Zap, in order for mutual respect to exist, both sides have to do the respecting. You haven't been very good at that in the past. Remember the time you refused to stand up when the American flag passed by during the Armed Forces day parade? Or the time you publicly encouraged other members of the Coalition to pull out of Iraq? Or your craven undercutting of America's Cuba policy? Or your attempt to sell American weapons technology to Venezuela? It's time for you to learn that behaving like a two-year-old has consequences.

Other news: Esperanza Aguirre publicly hinted that she might stand against Rajoy for PP president at the party convention. I bet she doesn't. More perversion: They busted 24 people for running an enormous prostitute-trafficking ring all throughout Spain that victimized Russian women; sixty women have been detained and will presumably be deported.

Kansas won the NCAA basketball championship last night in what everybody says was a spectacular game. Rock Chalk Jayhawk, whatever that means. That's got to be one of the dumbest college chants in the country. This year has been by far KU's best ever in sports, what with the football team going 12-1 and finishing fourth in the country.

The Ministry of Justice's civil servants have agreed to end their two-month strike which has left the courtrooms of Spain paralyzed. Things are so backed up that nobody's sure when literally thousands of cases are going to be resolved.

So the Olympic torch has provoked large protests in London and Paris; I'm glad to see the protests, but I'm not happy at all with the disturbances. Protest peacefully or don't protest. And, of course, the turnout at these demos against the Communist Chinese dictatorship is less than one percent of what the usual suspects can bring out when the bad guy is the United States.

My position on a boycott: I'm against any sort of government-organized boycotts, like those in Moscow and Los Angeles, since I think government and sports should have nothing to do with one another. If I were an athlete I'd stay home, but if an athlete decides to attend the Peking Olympics, he should behave himself as a guest of China and not make any political statements. Elected government officials should have nothing to do with the Olympics, since it's not an occasion of state but a private sports wingding; they should just ignore it. And as an individual, I am definitely boycotting it; I'm not going to watch it on TV, and I encourage everyone else to do the same.

Economics news: BBVA predicts Spain's economic growth in 2008 to be a mere 1.7-2.2%, and 2009's growth to be 0.8-2.0%. That's bad. Very bad. Unemployment's going to hit ten percent, easy, and the balanced budget is dead. The construction sector is looking at a 10% decline this year and as much as a 20% further decline in 2009. About the only good thing is that low growth may tame inflation, which is pushing 5% a year. BBVA doesn't think Spain will go into an actual recession, and that recovery may begin in the second half of 2009. Econ minister Pedro Solbes still predicts 3.1% growth for 2008. Somebody's wrong, and if the private sector and the government disagree, I tend to have more faith in the private sector, since if they're wrong they might lose their jobs. This does not happen at the Economics Ministry.

By the way, those huge construction complexes on the Mediterranean coast, most notoriously Marina d'Or in Oropesa, are in bad trouble. They're laying off thousands of workers and cutting apartment prices drastically. A lot of people made the mistake of investing their life savings in a coastal apartment, believing prices would just continue going up. Problem: They're going down, and fast. Wild guess: The "Las Vegas in Los Monegros" project is going to turn into a "Mini-Golf and Roadside Zoo in Los Monegros" project pretty soon.

Interesting investment idea: The barley growers' cooperative in Calaf, not too far from Vallfogona, is planning to open a small brewery to manufacture high-end beer to be sold mostly at restaurants as a gourmet item. Their marketing strategy is to sell it as a quality Catalan product, appealing to the "everything we make here is the best" feeling that's common around these parts. I figure it's pretty hard to go broke if you're selling beer, and that if it's a co-op, it's not some kind of fly-by-night company. They're looking for small investors. Shares are €3000 each, so if you buy one you're not gambling everything you have. (Note: I'm not putting any money into this myself.)

Get this: A bunch of Catalan-bourgeois rich kids put the Latino gangs to shame with their violence last night. They were at an expensive disco called Rosebud up near Tibidabo, and the cops pulled over a car with four of them in it, who were obviously loaded on alcohol and pills. The driver of the car head-butted a cop and broke his nose, and a fight broke out, which the rich punk kids lost. A couple of hours later, these four punks' friends decided they were going to wreck the disco, more than twenty of them, and the cops were called in. Chairs and bottles flew, and tens of thousands of euros' damage was done. A total of thirteen arrests were made, including the punks in the car, on charges of assault and battery, grievous bodily harm, and resisting arrest. Finally the cops arrest somebody around here. These little shits deserve to have the whole lawbook thrown at them, and to go to jail for a good long time, especially Mr. Headbutt. So what happened? The judge let them all go free on bail.

Breaking news: The Castilla-Leon autonomous government has announced that two people in the region have died of mad-cow disease. Uh-oh. Get this: Both deaths occurred more than a month ago. Seems like maybe they could have announced this before now.

More boat people: A cayuco with 56 illegal immigrants aboard, including 12 minors, washed up this morning on El Hierro in the Canaries. The West Africans are desperate enough to risk their lives trying to get out. The international press ignored the story as usual.

Get this: The Catalan regional government budgeted €20 million in 2006 to help out the very poorest people in Catalonia, those with a monthly income of €544 or less. Of course, I'm completely in favor of spending public money to help the less fortunate among us, at least in cases like this; it's part of the social contract that we provide a safety net to help those of us who can't make it on their own. We can debate how to provide that safety net, and how much we should spend on it, but you can't leave people to go hungry and be cold, even when (as is true in some cases) their poverty is at least partly their own fault.

So they've cut the number of people eligible for this program from 51,000 to 8000. By the way, there are 80,000 people in Catalonia whose only known income is their minimum old-age / disability pension of just €322. Just great. If we're going to help the poor, let's bloody well help the poor, instead of inventing new bureaucratic programs that don't seem to be doing a damn bit of good.

And people around here criticize the United States for being heartless toward the poor. Some guy told me the other day that New York was the city with the most poor people in the world. I said, "What about Calcutta and Lagos and Sao Paulo?" and he shut up. Where do people hear this crapola? From the Spanish media, of course. But why do they believe it?

Just in case you're interested, the Telegraph has a positive article about wind energy farms in Spain. Check it out.

Charlton Heston's death is getting big media play in Spain, and they're concentrating on his acting career rather than his political opinions, which is a nice change from the usual.

Barça choked last night and drew 0-0 against Getafe at home, a game they should have won and needed to win. For the first time since Laporta has been club president, the fans brought out their white hankies and had a "pañolada," when they wave said hankies en masse to show their displeasure. It's more clear than ever that everybody's head but Laporta's is going to roll at the end of this season.

So they busted 41 Internet kiddie porn pervs in another of those mass roundups we keep having in Spain. Question: Does your country have frequent kiddie-porn roundups as Spain does? Does Spain have an unusual amount of these people, or is Spain unusually vigilant in catching them, or do most countries have the same amount of these mass arrests going on?

Real Madrid choked last night in Mallorca but got out with a 1-1 draw, and Barcelona takes on Getafe tonight sans Ronaldinho. The story now is that it's nearly certain that Ronaldinho will be sold to Milan, which makes it even less likely that he's really injured; Milan wouldn't pay €20 million for a player who can't pass their physical. My guess is that Ronaldinho has been kicked off the team and they're trying to keep it quiet to avoid embarrassment for everybody. By the way, there's been some talk that Messi has been undisciplined this last season, going out too much and not watching his diet; at least, there's been enough talk that Messi's dad came out and said that he'd gotten himself back on track and was working hard to recover from his injuries.

Now they're saying that the Barcelona-Valencia high-speed train won't come into service until 2015 at the earliest. You'd think that would be a priority, connecting the country's second and third biggest cities, which aren't all that far apart; besides, the Barcelona-Tarragona stretch is already in operation.

So this week is supposed to be moderately rainy, which probably won't do much to refill the reservoirs, but ought to soak the ground pretty well. Actually, March was comparatively rainy around here; at least the situation didn't get any worse, and the land was able to absorb some water.

More boat people in the Canary Islands, this time 29 Moroccans who made Lanzarote. No international coverage, of course.

El País got interviews with both John McCain and Alan Greenspan.

El País's reporter talked to McCain on board his flight from the Martin Luther King* ceremony to Phoenix; the reporter was most interested in what US-Spain relations would be like under a McCain administration. McCain let loose with some standard boilerplate: "It's time to leave behind our disagreements with Spain. I would like (Zapatero) to visit the United States. I am very interested, not only in normalizing relations with Spain, but also in achieving good, productive relations with the goal of dealing with many issues and challenges we will have to face together."

Regarding Zap's repeated unfriendliness toward the US, McCain said, "We have to understand that there are things that happen during a political campaign, things that are said, decisions that are made in certain political situations, and we must understand that there may be agreements and disagreements. But I believe it is time to leave these things behind and to look forward with the viewpoint that we have many more values and goals that unite us than differences that separate us."

Very diplomatic, Senator McCain. Good job.

El País points out 1) that Zap is the only democratic prime minister who has not visited the US and 2) McCain hates the Castro regime like poison; he's never forgiven them because when he was a prisoner in Hanoi, they disguised one of their psychiatrists as a Spanish peace activist, and McCain agreed to speak with him. The Cuban shrink went back to Cuba and wrote an article in Granma portraying McCain as a murderous psychopath.

Greenspan said 1) the US economy is flexible enough, though the financial sector doesn't look good, that it won't be seriously affected by a credit crunch 2) the most serious problem is reduced business income due to the plateauing of consumer spending, though this is not caused by tight credit 3) the US is not currently in recession, and there's about a fifty-fifty chance that a recession will happen 4) we're at a crossroads and must choose between growth and inflation, and the priority should be keeping inflation down 5) we must keep protectionism at a minimum

6) Spain is vulnerable because of its real-estate bubble, Italy is problematic but always has been, and France and Germany look to be in good shape 7) Countries that open up their markets like the UK and Ireland are going to be much better shape than countries that resort to protectionism 8) Saddam's petroleum riches made him dangerous; if he hadn't had the oil money, he wouldn't have been able to cause so much trouble 9) He's for McCain 10) He fears the Democrats' protectionist rhetoric.

Get this comment from La Vanguardia's comments section on the "American Mentality" piece:

I have been told that in some states in the USA, North Carolina, Virginia, and Mississipi (sic), man-hunting exists, they turn loose a prisoner and hunt him like a rabbit, the victims are usually marginalized, generally blacks and Hispanics, and they are hunted like deer, with dogs and big rifles, a lot of money is spent on these hunts, human life in that country is worth nothing.

You see what I mean about poisonous anti-Americanism? How can a semi-literate adult possibly believe that such a thing is true?

The PSOE has not taken Bush's complete lack of interest in talking to Zap very well. They apparently really thought Zap was going to get some face time at the Bucharest summit, and of course he didn't, so they are tossing a two-year-old's tantrum. Check out this bit from Fernando Onega's column on page 20 of La Vanguardia's print edition.

Being stood up

There's no explanation for why Zapatero is chasing after Bush. Very influential people believe that the prime minister should stop begging and start demanding. Do you know what they call the movements of American forces in Spain? "An open bar."* Every day there's a naval operation, and every hour, a plane takes off. And at Morón**, whatever they want. Zapatero has no need to tolerate such humiliation.

*"Barra libre" is Spanish for, approximately, "being a generous host and having advantage taken of you."
**Morón is an American naval base on Spain's south coast.

So Zap is steaming mad and feels terribly humiliated. Good. But he has no choice but to tolerate such humiliation, unless he wants to pull Spain out of NATO. Which he would like to do, but can't, and he knows it, so he has to swallow it and smile. I hope McCain gets elected and ignores Zap for four more years.

Slow news day. The Zap government is in favor of an aqueduct bringing Ebro river water to Barcelona; the plan is not to take more water from the river, but to buy part of the excess water dedicated to irrigation from the farmers it's allotted to.

Zap also has a housing plan: cut the VAT on renovation work on older houses, build 150,000 public housing units, provide €5 billion for loans to public housing buyers, subsidize "young people's" rental payments by €210 a month, spend €400 million retraining construction workers, spend lots more money on public building projects, and refund everybody €400 on their income tax.

Cutting taxes on anything always makes sense. None of the rest of Zap's proposals sound like good ideas to me, unless the public building projects are actually useful rather than Forum-like boondoggles. And, of course, all this is going to play hell with the balanced budget.

More boat people: a cayuco with five people aboard washed up on Grand Canary. Since cayucos normally leave West Africa with a full load of 50-100 immigrants, I hope that what I think happened didn't really happen. Of course the international media ignored the story as usual.

A 23-foot shark has been sighted off the Catalan coast, both at the Puerto Olimpico beach in Barcelona and at Vilanova to the southwest. He is apparently injured or sick, since it's very rare for sharks to come in so close; I've never heard of anyone being attacked by a shark at a Mediterranean beach. This one is a basking shark, which feeds on plankton, so it doesn't attack anything anyway. They think it's been hooked or tangled in a net, and they're going to go out and try to rescue it today.

I ate shark once in Mexico, back when I still ate fish. It's actually not bad, though it's a very meaty fish, if you know what I mean.

Fact: Ronaldinho's out for the rest of the season with some kind of "injury." Rumor: AC Milan has offered €20 million for him. That would be buying high and selling low, but I'm starting to think Ronaldinho's a sunk cost and you might as well get anything you can out of it right now.

Here's a wonderful case of Europeans just not getting it. One of La Vanguardia's readers sent in a photo of a sign he saw in Michigan. It reads, "No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again."

Now, of course, that's a joke. Of course it's not legal to shoot trespassers, and it's even more illegal to shoot them twice. Whoever posted this sign is making an attempt at humor using hyperbole.

So check out our reader's commentary:

The American Mentality

A photograph of a sign I saw in the US. Specifically, outside a field near the highway uniting Detroit and Chicago.

A clear image of the fearful and aggressive American attitude. I wouldn't want to get lost there and ask to make a phone call.

So of course you've got to figure there will be some gems among the reader comments (though one commenter has twigged that it just might be a joke):

Most of them are exactly like that. Some of them are worse.

The curious thing is that they're proud of being like that. I don't understand how in the 21st century people still admire them, since they're disgusting.

The sign in this photo says a great deal about the cowboy (sic) mentality that plagues their society, and, unfortunately, we other countries allow them to export this aggressive mentality when they go out to save the world in their crusades to keep their petroleum and arms industry. The US could learn to be a little more civilized.

The US at the world level is still sacking, killing, and stealing all it wants to get rich. As the drunk Bush says GOD BLESS AMERICA. What bad people.

It's not a mentality, it's fear.

It's the civilization of death.

Although deniers of anti-Americanism claim that they merely dislike the government, it's pretty clear that these commenters despise both the society and the people of the United States.

And check out this last comment, apparently from a megalomaniac and poorly-educated Mexican holding a 150-year-old grudge:

If you only knew the truth: the Americans were 15 English colonies that stole Mexican territory (most of the north) along with the petroleum and gold we had. They're thieves, and they've always been associated with paganism. This is why Mexico is sunk, but that doesn't matter, we hope for a better Mexico, we're going to be the world's biggest power.

So La Vangua has an article marking the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. No problems here except for a very common Spanish media error: They don't suss that when an American has three names, 99% of the time the second name is what we call a middle name, and not the first surname as it would be in Spanish. So they habitually refer to Martin Luther King as Luther King rather than King, and to James Earl Ray as Earl Ray rather than Ray.

By the way, the Spanish National Health thinks my middle name, Stuart, is my first surname, and so every time I have any business with them I have to make sure they check the files under both names. Also, people from phone companies who call me up trying to sell me their cellular plan always ask for Señor Stuart; I know right off the bat if a caller is "roast leg of insurance salesman," or, like, somebody from the office or the bank.

The "Maradona of the Rambla," who's been doing stunts with a soccer ball and passing the hat among the tourists on the Rambla near Plaza Catalunya for as long as I can remember, is retiring because he's reached 65. He claims the world record for keeping a soccer ball in the air the longest, and he's a well-known local character. Another Barcelona icon saddles up and rides off into the sunset.

The Zap government is definitely not going to send any water from the Segre-Ebro to Barcelona. Now Zap claims he'd never heard about the idea before he read about it in the papers. The Catalan Socialist environment counselor, Francesc Baltasar, looks like a liar: before the election he publicly denied, not once but twice, that the Generalitat was considering an aqueduct to transfer water from the Segre to the Llobregat. Then he got into a moronic semantic argument over the meaning of "transfer water." Turns out now they were considering precisely that the whole time; on November 29 they held a meeting at the environmental ministry in Madrid to discuss what to do about the drought, and decided to hold back any public announcements until after the election. Most likely head to roll: Environment minister Cristina Narbona.

The words "transfer water" are politically loaded, since the PP's goddamn water plan to transfer Ebro water to Valencia, Murcia, and Almeria, was shot down by a Catalan-Aragonese Socialist intransigent opposition to sending any Ebro water anywhere else. Now the PP is in position to embarrass the Socialists with their plan to transfer Ebro water to Barcelona, since the Socialists had argued that any water transfer would create an ecological tragedy.

The forecasters are predicting a rainy spring, which would be a very good thing. There are some dark clouds coming out of the northwest today.

Coverage of the American elections over here centers on the Democratic race. Al Gore has managed to make himself into a figure beloved among the Catalan enviroleft and the rest of the Do-Gooders International, and Obama's proposal to make Al some kind of environmental czar has gone over big here. Chelsea and her difficulties with people asking her about her dad and Monica has also been big news. Obama and Reverend Wrong didn't get nearly as much coverage, and Hillary's Bosnia thing has pretty much blown over. Notice that Spanish coverage focuses on personalities rather than issues, but a lot of American coverage does too.

Updates: The ETA killers of Isaías Carrasco have not been caught yet, and I have heard virtually nothing about the case since the election. I also haven't heard anything recently about the Islamist terrorist cell rounded up in January--remember, the ones who were going to plant bombs in the subway. Zap never got his meeting with Bush at the Bucharest summit, the meeting that the PSOE had made such a big deal about; Spain's still in the freezer as far as the American administration is concerned. And the goddamn bus drivers aren't striking today or next Thursday, but they're going on an indefinite strike starting April 15.

The goddamn Jehovah's Witnesses, who in Barcelona are a bunch of Brits, came around today wanting to leave some literature. I was polite but told them firmly I wasn't interested. What they do is target people with English names; they rang at my doorbell and asked over the intercom if I spoke English. The Mormons, who are a bunch of Americans, don't come around to your house, but they target English-speakers on the city streets. I respect their right to their beliefs, but I also have the right to be left alone.

Want some more free-floating anti-Americanism? Check out these pearls from La Vanguardia's reader comments section on the story about the NATO summit in Bucharest. Yes, I know that reader comments sections don't prove anything except for the ideology of the commenter himself, but it's interesting that of the 17 comments at this writing, 13 are anti-American. Check out a few of them.

NATO is an organism belonging to the White House warmongers in order to keep imposing their will and their interests on the world, thus creating tensions and problems and solving, in the long term, nothing, just leaving time bombs for the future.

Are these European political parties leading us toward independence? No. They're leading us toward the brink and towards vassalization. We and our families are the Yankees' real anti-missile screen. As an independent person, I refuse to support all these traitors of our freedom and our nation.

NATO was born, in theory, to protect Europe from the threats of the Soviet Union. The expansion of this American organization today has clear goals of colonialism and the spread of Yankee influence to the former states of the Warsaw Pact, thereby undermining the sovereignty of Europe itself. The dream of an independent Europe that functions at least internationally with one voice seems farther and farther away, and even Utopian. We are more and more Greek and they are more and more Roman.

How sad, when we could make our own way forward as a union, and what we do is take our pants down and rend homage to the Yankees. Anti-missile shield? Whose missiles? At what price? Under what command? What we are doing is allowing our enemy into our home and letting it govern us. Like the English who would follow the US to destruction if it were necessary. But now we have them inside the EEC (sic) blocking the wheels of the European project as much as they can.

While Latin America, little by little, is ceasing to be the US's "back yard," Europe is quickly becoming its "front yard." Requiescat in pace European autonomy. Europe, with its Frankenstein named NATO, is now the ideal instrument for the strengthening of the US's imperial ambitions.

They say the whole European elite is on Washington's payroll, including the leaders of the EU in Brussels, and before making decisions they consult with the Americans; therefore, nothing should surprise us or cause us to complain.

The problem is always the people. If the citizens support them. "Europe should stay united and safe." So what do the Yankees have to do with it? They come to tell us what to do. No.

"The 26 members of NATO have agreed to fully support the US anti-missile shield..." Or full obedience to the orders of the dirty Yankees? Yes, bwana, yes (sic). Servile until the end, these sepoys.* NATO exists to heat up the atmosphere, to foment cold wars and commit provocations. And, above all, to assure the power and the interests of Washington, among which arms sales is not the least.

(Professional) soldiers are the principal disease that must be extirpated from this world, and they are always an intrinsic part of the problems, deficits, and conflicts that our much-loved planet suffers from. Everything that does not mean the progressive dismanteling of all armies (legal and illegal) will be hypernegative and counterproductive for those of us who live on Earth. No NATO or soldiers or armies. They are the real problem!

It's for the fallen mercenaries for God and the Empire. An institution that does not respect international institutions like when they bombed Yugoslavia. Now they want us to buy into it in order to intervene wherever and whenever.

*"Sepoy" is the term used among pro-ETA circles to describe the Basque police, implying that they are mercenary traitors and collaborationists.

The last comment is pretty incoherent in Spanish, too.

Besides the question of where we're going to get water from this summer, everybody's talking about the Barça again. TV3 and La Vanguardia are both reporting that Pep Guardiola will replace Frank Rijkaard next season as Barça's coach. It's about time, really; Rikjaard had a great run, including two Leagues and a Champions, and Barça is still alive in this year's Champions, though Valencia eliminated them from the Spanish Cup and they're about dead in the League. But it's obviously time for a total housecleaning, and a new coach with a new system is a necessary part of that.

It's difficult for Americans to understand how big Barça is in this city. If you put together all the love and attention that Boston gives to its Red Sox, Patriots, and Celtics, it still wouldn't approach the emotional commitment that Barça fans have to their team.

One important factor: FC Barcelona is owned by its 100,000 club members, who are ordinary Catalan citizens, and not by some millionaire from somewhere else, so fans feel like the team is their own property, which it is. All club members get a vote for club president, and club elections are fought just as hard as the ones for real political office.

Current Barça president Joan Laporta gets as much press coverage as Catalan premier Montilla and a lot more than Barcelona mayor Hereu. Whenever Laporta says something dumb, like the time he declared the "Catalan Republic of Barça," it makes the national news.

Another factor is that Barça is identified with a particular political perspective, Catalan nationalism (sometimes verging on Catalunacy) mixed with agin-the-gummint-in Madrid sentiment.

Oh, yeah, the other rumor is that Milan has proposed an Adriano-Ronaldinho trade. The problem is that Barça does not either need or want Adriano, another head case who gets hurt a lot.

Zap slammed the door, and this time it looks to be permanent, on the Segre-Llobregat aqueduct, meaning we're going to have to look for water somewhere else. The hotels and other tourist establishments are kicking up a fuss, since if we get to the point of actually cutting off the water a day or two a week, it's going to look just awful, totally Third World. They're already mad because they can't fill up their swimming pools.

It seems to me like the best solution is an aqueduct from the Rhone in France, the closest source of lots of fresh water. Yes, it will be expensive and the French will charge us out the ass and it will take several years to build. So what? Barcelona is like LA, more people live here than there's enough water to support, and importing water is a basic necessity. Some illustrious politicians should have actually gotten around to doing it several years ago, instead of just dicking around and chatting about it: it's not like importing Rhone water is precisely a new idea.

We've got another NIMBY-ecologist problem with infrastructure: the high-tension connection over the Pyrenees to the French electrical grid. The usual gang of Luddites have managed to delay this necessary connection for years; it would likely have prevented last summer's Great Barcelona Blackout. They're having demos and the like and protesting away as usual.

Big news from Bucharest and the NATO summit: Croatia and, get this, Albania are going to be admitted, while Macedonia, Ukraine, and Georgia will receive cooperation but not become members. Who'd have predicted that Enver Hoxha's hellhole would join NATO just two decades later? The Greeks want to keep Macedonia out; I vote we admit Macedonia and kick the Greeks out. NATO also gave full approval to American anti-missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, and France will rejoin NATO's command structure as well as send 800 troops to Afghanistan. Fulsome congratulations to Nicolas Sarkozy.

La Vanguardia's take is, get this, that this is "bad news for Bush" because Ukraine and Georgia didn't get invitations to join. Huh? It sounds like the Americans got everything else they wanted.

Remember after the election when the PSOE claimed that Bush and Zapatero would hold a meeting at Bucharest, in which Bush would presumably throw himself at Zap's feet while ululating "Mea maxima culpa"? Yeah, right. Bush bumped into Zap in the hallway and said, "Hola, hola, felicitaciones," and walked off. The PSOE is at the point of "not ruling out the possibility" of a conversation between the two.

Wacky conspiracy theory of the week: The Competition Commission is accusing several food producers' associations of colluding to raise food prices. The thing is that food prices are up about the same amount in every country in the world, because of the high prices of petroleum and grain. Besides, the food-processing business is so fragmented and semi-localized that it would be virtually impossible to get so many independent producers to conspire against the consumers.

I have a bone to pick with La Vanguardia. Yesterday, in their daily back-page interview, they talked to some poor confused person named Beatriz Preciado, who is billed as a "pansexual and transgender philosopher." Seems to me more like she's a lesbian who likes to take testosterone and dress up as a man. That's fine, we have a diverse society, and there's room for all sorts of weirdos as long as they don't frighten the horses.

However, Ms. Preciado said, "The birth control pill was invented to reduce the birth rate of blacks in the United States."

I have no problem with Ms. Preciado's harmless silliness about "pharmacopornographic biocapitalism" and "biotechnopolitical constructions." But I have a major problem with her making up false history, and I have an even larger problem with La Vanguardia's failure to point out that her statement about the racist origins of the birth control pill is a straight-out lie.

(The only connection between the birth control pill and racism is that the notorious Margaret Sanger was in favor of both of them. Sanger, of course, had nothing to do with developing the Pill.)

This is why Europeans believe so much crazy stuff about the United States. Their media lets tinfoil hat jobs like Ms. Preciado spout off, and then fails to correct their numerous errors, both intentional and unintentional.

Everybody's talking about the drought and the possible measures that might be taken to palliate it. It's a big enough deal that La Vanguardia has a front-page editorial saying that something needs to be done; also, so much spouting off is already being done that rumors are beginning to fly. Somebody reported yesterday that reservoir capacity was already below 20%, which it isn't, at least not yet, but everybody panicked temporarily.

La Vangua's editorial points out that the Valencians are having fun criticizing the Catalan government for the plan to send Segre-Ebro River water to Barcelona, since Catalonia had fought so hard against Ebro water being sent to Valencia. Lleida province is indignant, too, at losing water to the city slickers in Can Fanga, and the Lleida PSC is in open revolt against Montilla (who wants to grab all water possible for Barcelona) and in line with Zapatero in Madrid (who has at least temporarily blocked the Segre transfer). La Vangua blames the Pujol administration for doing almost nothing about water supplies during its 23 years in power, but adds that everyone in both Catalan and Spanish politics is guilty. Funny: I don't remember La Vangua making too much noise about this issue before, either.

Right now there are several proposals being floated: the Segre-Llobregat aqueduct, an aqueduct connecting the Urgell irrigation canal with the Anoia River, an aqueduct bringing Ebro water straight to Barcelona, opening up old wells in the Baix Llobregat, and bringing water by ship from wells in the Tarragona plain, from the Rhone in Marseilles, and from the Almeria desalinizing plant. Desalinizing plants are currently being built at El Prat, Cunit, and Blanes, to come on line between 2009 and 2012.

Statistics: Residents of Peking use 670 liters of water a day, New York 500, Tokyo 320, Havana 270, Paris 160, Cairo 150, and Barcelona 110. Jeez. We're even dirtier than the French. That fetid cloud you see rising up over the city ain't just carbon monoxide from Seat tailpipes.

Economic news: bad. Unemployment has reached 9%, up from 8.1% this time last year, and higher than any other EU country except Slovakia. Meanwhile, new car sales are down 28% over this time last year, with 4x4 sales down more than 40%. The automobile sector claims it's because Semana Santa fell in March this year, and so there were three sales days less than in March 2007. Yeah, right.

The Independent headlines, "USA 2008: The Great Depression." Yeah, more wishful thinking from the British press: what pisses me off is that they want it to happen. They want Americans to be poor and suffer deprivation. It would please them no end if one-third of us were unemployed like in 1932. Of course, nothing of the sort is going to happen.

Check out their evidence: The number of Americans on food stamps has increased from 26.5 million to 28 million--still less than one-tenth of the population. That's all they've got to base their screamer front-page headline on. Wonder where the praise for the American system of feeding the poor went to? If, say, Venezuela or Cuba were passing out food stamps to its poor, they'd be praising it to the skies. Of course, in Venezuela and Cuba there's no food to pass out to anyone.

By the way, most Spaniards have no idea that poor Americans get food stamps and public housing and public schools and Medicare/Medicaid. They've been told that life in America consists of cutthroat competition, and he who falls by the wayside is left to starve, and they believe it.

Econ minister Pedro Solbes stuck his neck out and claimed that Spain's 2008 growth would be 3.1%, much higher than the Bank of Spain's estimate of 2.4%. Somebody's going to be wrong and I bet it's the politician rather than the institution.

The PP is replacing Eduardo Zaplana with Soraya Saenz de Santamaria as its spokeswoman in the Congress of Deputies, something they should have done like three years ago. Saenz de Santamaria is known as a Rajoy loyalist and comparatively moderate, as well as less personally obnoxious than attack-dog Zaplana.

ADSL Internet service is 25% more expensive and 26% slower in Spain than the EU average. Spanish ADSL speed is 3 megas, whatever that means, while in the UK and France it's 8 megas. Thanks a lot, Telefonica, for crap service at premium prices. Somebody needs to go all AT&T on that company.



Check out this Yankee-bashing cartoon from El Periodico's Ferreres, about as subtle as a dose of chloral hydrate. Uncle Sam says, "You should respect human rights more," while China replies, "Respect? Like at Guantanamo? Like in Palestine?" Simply pathetic.

Meanwhile, NATO is asking some of its members to provide more troops for Afghanistan; the Americans are sending 3000, and even the French will send 1000. Naturally, they're not even bothering to request additional troops from Zap's Spain, since none will be forthcoming.

Oh, guess what. Raul is beginning the liberalization of Cuba. From now on Cubans will be allowed to stay at hotels hitherto reserved only for foreigners. If they can pay a hundred bucks a night, that is. Of course, that silly freedom of speech stuff will take a little while longer, as will the democratic elections and the rule of law.

Yearly inflation in Spain hit 4.6% in March, the highest rate since 1997. Oil and food prices are to blame. The ECB's goal was a maximum of 2% inflation in 2008. Looks like that ain't gonna happen.

Get this. Clickair, Iberia's low-cost airline, forgot that we changed to daylight savings time last weekend, so a bunch of passengers missed their flights. Unfortunately, this kind of complete screwup (called a "chapuza" in Spanish) is all too common over here. One of the best things about Spain is that it's a low-stress, laid-back country, but sometimes we can get a little too laid-back around here.

Meanwhile, Clickair and Vueling, another low-cost airline, are planning a merger in order to reduce costs and competition; this will mean even fewer flights out of El Prat, since duplicates will obviously be eliminated. I think the antitrust authorities ought to look into this. This fad of adding an -ing on the end of a Spanish word to make it look more international or something (Vueling, Bicing, etc.) has got to stop now.

Alarmist Andy Robinson gets the first two pages of La Vanguardia's international section to wax nostalgic for the good old USSR. Says Andy:

Draconian drug prohibition and absolute permissiveness for all business and financial activities. This is a good summary of the global agenda of the United States and the G-7 in the '80s and '90s, accelerated after the fall of the Soviet Union...Simultaneously, the Anglo-American model of financial liberalization, deregulating enormous capital flows, was exported, while teams of economists from Chicago landed in the former USSR and its satellites...Prohibitionism has helped the gangsters almost as much as laissez-faire...Because of all this, "it is not crazy to think that instead of prohibiting drugs and permitting the free circulation of capital, we should do just the opposite," said criminologist Michael Woodiwiss of the University of Bristop. "Strict regulations over the financial markets should be applied." The Americans should know this: "During Prohibition of alcohol and financial permissiveness, crime was endemic." What put an end to it was not Elliot (sic) Ness, but the regulation of the market, the creation of the FBI, and in general the social policies of Roosevelt's New Deal.

1) Iberian Notes completely agrees with Andy that the prohibition of drugs is the biggest mistake the American government is currently making. 2) Andy doesn't seem to understand that US foreign policy is not coherent over time; it depends greatly on who the president is, and so the US does not have a global agenda. Much less the G-7, made up of seven different elected governments including France and Italy. That lot can't agree on what's for dinner, much less a big secret global plan to let the Jewish-American financial powers that be run rampant.

3) He doesn't seem to understand, either, that today's Russian mafia is yesterday's KGB, and that the old USSR was an incredibly corrupt place. The Americans prohibit people from buying intoxicating drugs; the USSR prohibited people from buying most of the things they needed or wanted. Which form of prohibition is going to create a bigger black market? 4) Laissez-faire is a straw man. No government has ever pursued a complete laissez-faire policy; all governments have regulated the market ever since governments have existed. The question is not whether to regulate, but how much.

5) Andy doesn't know dick-squat about American history. The alcohol business was merely one of many that organized crime was involved in, the FBI didn't get into the struggle against organized crime until the '50s and it wasn't very effective until the late '70s, and the social policies of the New Deal had absolutely nothing to do with the Mafia. Duh.

In contrast to the usual wishful-thinking wet dream periodically published in the Spanish press about the decline of the "American Empire," to be replaced by Europe or China or even the Arab states, Joaquim Coello, billed as an engineer, writes in El Periodico:

The decline of the United States is not inevitable. It will be proven again that the principles of democracy, freedom, and equality of the citizens have power and strength, and despite their faults, they are superior to any other political system. The superiority of the United States's political structure, based on the principles of the Declaration of Independence of 1776, will be demonstrated one more time.

I've never seen anything like this in the Spanish press before.

Barça choked again big-time Saturday night, losing 3-2 to Betis after going ahead 0-2 on goals by Bojan and Eto'o. They played well in the first half and just horribly in the second, and as soon as Betis scored its first goal, everybody in the bar groaned because we knew the game was over and Barça was going to blow it again. Iniesta and Bojan were by far the best Barça players.

I think we need to stop speculating about who's going to be sold during the off-season, and start wondering who's going to stay. I'd keep Iniesta, Xavi, Messi, Bojan, Eto'o, Valdés, Jorquera, Giovani dos Santos, Touré, and Milito, and get rid of the rest of them, including Puyol, who is washed-up.

You may have noticed that I've changed the template. I'll be making more changes in the next few days.

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.

Vallfogona de Riucorb made TV3 and La Vanguardia! Says Victor-M. Amela:

Another televised revelation, yesterday morning. Josep Cuní went live to the cemetery in Vallfogona de Riucorb, in order to document a mass grave there in which dozens of unidentified young soldiers were buried during the Civil War. On screen, the gravedigger explained right there that during construction work, the power shovel dug up the dirt and "there were arm and leg bones, skulls, bones everywhere." Cuní asked what happened to those bones. The gravedigger answered, "We threw them with all the other stuff in the dump in the ravine over there. What were we going to do, Mr. Cuní?" Mr. Cuní's face was frozen in shock and he had no answer. The law is one thing, crude reality another, as TV reveals.

The gravedigger was almost certainly Ramon from Cal Matruqueu, the town's builder and odd-job man, who is 75 if he's a day. He buried Rosa: that is, he opened up the niche, removed Remei's father's coffin and bones, put Rosa's coffin inside, put a plastic bag with Remei's father's bones back in, and sealed up the niche again. He was a friend of Remei's father; they grew up together. As Remei says, they're country people around there and they're not squeamish about death.

I had no idea there was a Civil War mass grave in Vallfogona. The soldiers would have been Republicans, probably wounded brought to a makeshift hospital in one of the hotels at the spa during the Battle of the Ebro in late 1938. The Ebro was the fiercest battle of the war, and the only place anywhere near Vallfogona that saw serious fighting.

Actually, I don't know much about the Civil War in Vallfogona; they don't talk about it much. I do know: 1) the hotels at the spa served as a CNT officers' school, at least for a time 2) the priest was not murdered, he escaped with the help of some locals, supposedly including Remei's father's family 3) the medieval statue of Saint Peter atop the church was pulled down; Remei's grandfather saved the middle section in the basement, and Remei donated it to the county museum a while back 4) the local teacher was a CNT member and he fired up at least some townspeople; he somehow survived the war 5) Remei's father's family were conservative Catholics and Carlists, like many of the townspeople; most townspeople were landowning peasants, kulaks in Stalinist jargon 6) I have heard nothing about any executions in the town, whether by Republicans or Nationals.

I am going to have to investigate this. Also, I think something needs to be done in order to give these people a decent burial, and I'm going to find out what I can do.

Manuel Trallero says today, also in La Vanguardia, that commemorating the 70th anniversary of the 1938 Italian bombing of Barcelona and its victims is a good thing, but that other victims need to be commemorated too:

"We have a historical deficit and a debt to pay," declared counsellor Saura* at the Palau de la Generalitat. The victims of the bombing of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War were first hidden by Francoism and then completely ignored by democracy. Now, with the 70th anniversary of the famous bombing of the Coliseum cinema by Italian aircraft, which caused a massacre because it blew up a passing truck loaded with explosives--a fact conveniently hidden by the Republic--ceremonies are held, books are published, films are premiered.

It doesn't matter that there is no documentary evidence of Churchill's alleged words to the House of Commons ("I do not want to undervalue the severity of the damage falling on you, but I trust our citizens will be capable of resisting as bravely as the valient people of Barcelona.")

Barcelona also has "a historical deficit and a debt to pay" to the victims of the "checas."** Many of them, victims because they went to Mass or were anarchists. The reasons are varied. But victims of that axiom from Miguel Mir's "Diary of an Anarchist Gunman": "Our job is to kill and your duty is to die." Let nobody fool himself. It was not the work of mere rioters...All the Republican parties, in addition to the feared SIM,*** had such establishments. This is not an attempt at Fascist propaganda...We have a debt to these victims, just as much victims as those of the bombings of Barcelona.

*Joan Saura is the leader of the Catalan Communists, ICV.
**Secret Republican prisons where prisoners were tortured, interrogated, and killed. The Anarchist checa was at Gran Via and Paseo de Gracia, while the main Communist checa was on the Calle Sant Elies.
***Servicio de Inteligencia Militar, the Military Intelligence Service, the NKVD in Spain.

Trallero's wrong about one thing. Churchill said, "I do not at all underrate the severity of the ordeal which lies before us; but I believe our countrymen will show themselves capable of standing up to it, like the brave men of Barcelona, and will be able to stand up to it, and carry on in spite of it, at least as well as any other people in the world," in his "Their Finest Hour" speech on June 18, 1940, to the House of Commons.

La Vanguardia has an article on what they call the Bologna process (what the goddamn university non-students were "striking" over), which is supposed to help make European universities competitive with American ones. According to La Vangua, of the 535 best universities in the world, 308 are in the US, 50 in the UK, 26 in Canada, 20 in Germany, 19 in Japan, and 1 in Spain, which is the University of Barcelona medical school.

Massive cognitive dissonance for Yankee-bashers: Americans are supposed to be ignorant, unintellectual, and uncultured. Yet the US has all the top universities and the most Nobel Prize winners, for whatever that's worth, and it attracts thousands of students from all over the world.

La Vangua claims that the US spends 3% of its gross national product on research and development, while the EU spends 1.2%, and that 5% of Americans between ages 30 and 50 are enrolled in university or post-graduate studies, while only 2% of EU citizens are. Therefore, the Bologna plan will devote more public spending to raising these percentages. The problem is that the majority of US R&D spending comes from the private sector, and that the 5% of Americans continuing their educations are doing so in order to reach personal, not public, goals.

Many Spaniards I've talked to are very critical of the Spanish university system; I've heard people say that it's based on memorization and regurgitation, that it discourages individual initiative, that it doesn't teach students how to think, that professors are distant and uninterested in students as individuals, that it's too bureaucratic and regimented, and that there is a lot of nepotism and patronage involved in choosing instructors. A personal observation of mine is that many Spaniards resort to invoking authority as evidence to back up their arguments--so-and-so said this so it must be true. I think they learned this at the university.

Poverty in Catalonia: 19% of Catalans live below the poverty line, which is a yearly income of €8276 (about $12,100) per person, up from 17.2% last year. Comparison with the US: About 12% of Americans live below the federal poverty line, which is $10,400 for an individual living alone and $21,200 for a family of four. In-kind benefits, such as food stamps, school lunches, and public housing, do not count as income in the US for purposes of measuring poverty. 46% of poor households in the US own their own home, 30% have two or more cars, 63% have cable or satellite TV, and 91% have a color television.

Here in B-ville, the city government is all excited about the tacky souvenir shops that surround touristy places like the Sagrada Familia and the Ramblas. Indignation waxes, especially at the flamenco-dancing dolls and the big Mexican sombreros. I have to admit I'm surprised at how popular the Mexican hats are among the Dusseldorfers, Rotterdammers, and Liverpudlians. If you buy one and walk around town all the locals think you're a complete idiot, but I figure everybody who reads this blog already knows that.

Personally, I never buy stuff at souvenir shops; I always get something at the museum gift shop. I especially like little reproductions of animal statues; my favorite is the Egyptian cat-god from the British Museum. Here in Barcelona, the City History Museum's shop on Calle Llibreteria has nice stuff worth at least looking at. They sell little silver reproductions of a Visigothic (early medieval) horse that was found during an archaeological dig, which are a bit pricey but worth it.

The goddamn bus drivers voted to go on strike indefinitely beginning on April 15 if the city government doesn't give them what they want. So far more than 200 buses have been sabotaged by the strikers.

Latino gang fight in L'Hospitalet. Gunshots fired. One hospitalized, stabbed in arm and leg. Three arrested. Gang involved: Dominicans calling themselves the "Black Panthers," in English. This is getting a bit out of hand.

Value-added tax (IVA) receipts are down 8% since January 1 due to the halt in the construction sector. This is going to play hell with the budget.

Ronaldinho has burned his bridges: his manager (and brother) threatened to sign him up with Real Madrid, and claimed he could legally break Dinho's contract for a €16 million buyout, far less than the €125 million buyout clause in his contract. So don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. Luis Fernandez, Dinho's coach at Paris-St. Germain, just came out with a book accusing him of being a selfish player and breaking all the team rules, especially those related to eating properly and staying home at night.