The Day of the Worker

May 1st isn't really celebrated in the US... in the old days, we'd amuse ourselves watching the Soviet May Day parade with all the marching soldiers and giant missile launchers.

Here in Spain, it's a big deal, and usually there's some massive march through Barcelona organized by one of the unions.

To celebrate, we watched "Capitalism: A Love Story", which I though was somewhat underwhelming. Many sad stories about people getting kicked out of their houses, but few details about how they managed to get into that situation. The practice of companies taking out insurance policies ("dead peasant policies") on their employees was somewhat icky (they didn't explain in the movie that it's mostly done for tax favorable investment income), but no one was alleging that the companies purposely try to kill off their employees. In the end, I just don't think that Michael Moore had any compelling insights into the whole situation.

Deniability and three year olds

Our three year old seems to have regressed to his terrible twos. Unfortunately, now he's taller, more dexterous and able to get into all kinds of things he is not supposed to get into. Hunting around in my home office for "regalitos" is his new favorite activity.

His latest:

"Did you take all the files out of the filing cabinet!?" I ask him in horror.

"No I didn't, because you didn't see me do it."

Perhaps he will have a future at Goldman Sachs...

The Antisocial Dogs of Sant Cugat

Something I've noticed about Santcugatenc dogs recently (other than their habit of pooping everywhere or barking too much) is that they are generally antisocial. In the US, having a dog is a great way to meet new people, since when you go for a walk, you meet other dog people and chat with them.

Here it seems like people buy big, loud and aggressive dogs so that they can protect their giant mansions from the eastern European burglars that seems to frequent these parts. In this case, if you have a dog (especially of the small "kick-me-I-bark-too-much" variety), it's probably safer to just cross the street when you see another dog, rather than have to play dog referee (and possibly emergency paramedic).

Crazy renter laws and empty flats

For many in Spain, it has become more difficult to rent (despite lots of available flats), mainly due to the increasing paranoia of landlords in Spain. Many places will now ask for 6 months of rent as a deposit, which is pretty much impossible for most people.

The reason behind this is the somewhat bizarre renter's rights laws that allow landlords to get into Kafkaesque situations where the renter has disappeared, is not paying rent, but is unable to evict because they cannot serve papers to the tenant. Taking the law into your own hands can result in jail time for the landlord, so is not recommended.

I have heard from other people that actual defaults on rents are relatively rare, but the horror stories of the times when things go wrong are so bad, that owners would rather be willing to give up months of rent with an empty apartment, than potentially risk this happening to them.

It seems to me like there would be a business opportunity in creating a company that guarantees tenant rent by taking a lien on some property (such as a car, or parents property, etc), which would only be exercised in case of default. This would improve the life of the renter, since they wouldn't have large amounts of money tied up in useless (and non-interest earning) deposits, and the landlord could rent out places more quickly.

Varela temporarily disqualifies himself

Varela is apparently at least somewhat embarrassed that Manos Limpias plagiarized most of his own ruling for the contents of their indictment against Garzon.

I think the original plan was that Manos Limpias was going to do a reasonable indictment, to which Varela would say "hmm... this sounds serious, I guess the only way to know for sure is to go to trial".

Unfortunately for Varela, the indictment that Manos Limpias actually submitted was full of crazy allegations and was completely unusable. So Varela told them to please take all the crazy shit out of the indictment, but only gave them 24 hours to do it. Continuing their obvious stupidity at blowing their first chance to indict Garzon, Manos Limpias then did a whole-scale plagiarization of Varela's findings and submitted that as the indictment. That put Varela into an impossible situation, since he couldn't really rule on the validity of his own rulings.

My guess is the Supreme Court will just dump the whole thing and charge Garzon on the basis of the Santander allegations instead. The main advantage of the Santander being that most people don't understand what the case is really about, and most likely the foreign press (whom the Supreme Court seems to really care about impressing) wouldn't be able to bring Franco into the picture.

How babies are born in Spain

From our research so far, this is what we are expecting:

PP's new strategy to win in Catalunya

Perhaps PP thinks it has finally hit on a good way to win more than 5 votes in Catalunya by appealing to the xenophobic segment of the population. Their recent banner in Badalona saying that they don't like Romanians (I guess they mean gypsies... realizing the fact that Romania isn't entirely populated by gypsies would probably overheat their brains).

The flaw in the strategy may be the fact that most of the "kick non-Catalans out of Catalunya" groups tend to also be pro-independence.

In a somewhat related story, I heard a radio interview today of some KKK members and/or militia members in the US, which made me think that if I ever decided to be a racist, I'd have to figure out some way to exclude those idiots. As a counterexample to the theory of white racial superiority, these morons would definitely be exhibit A.