Spain

An American idiot abroad

Featured image There are only about four weeks left in the 2026 legislative session in Minnesota. The state is a basket case, overrun with fraud and people tripping over themselves fleeing for better locales (including, naturally enough, the fraudsters themselves). What is the state’s chief executive up to? From The Hill newspaper, Walz in Spain rips ‘feeble-minded’ Trump, Vance over Iran war. The Hill reports, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) issued sharp »

Right wing gains around the world

Featured image From BBC News, Japanese stocks surge as Takaichi secures historic election victory. Right-wing Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi gambled on a snap election for parliament and won a huge victory, giving her ruling party not just an outright majority, but an outright supermajority. Less successful was the gamble taken on a snap election in the northeastern Spanish region of Aragon by the leading center-right Peoples Party (PP). Together with the »

Spain gives illegals the vote

Featured image I’m not kidding. From Fox News last week, Spain legalizes up to 500,000 undocumented migrants, sparking backlash. The socialist prime minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez, heads a minority government propped up by the nation’s separatist parties. His party finished second in the 2023 election, behind the  conservative People’s Party. The socialists lagged the conservatives in the popular vote by more than 340,000. Sanchez is not going to allow that to »

They experiment, you die

Featured image Remember that massive power outage in Spain and Portugal last month? From the UK Daily Mail, Eco-experiment that ‘blacked out entire country’: Spanish scientists ‘were experimenting with how far they could push renewable energy’ before country-wide chaos. And how did that go? The BBC wrote at the time, At least three people have died in Spain in an incident linked to a massive power cut that shut the country down »

Blackout In Spain: Solar Power to Blame?

Featured image The cause of the blackout that afflicted Spain, Portugal and part of France has not yet been determined. But cyberattack seems to have been ruled out, and some are sayingd that Spain’s reliance on solar energy is to blame: REE [the Spanish grid operator] said it had identified two incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants, in Spain’s southwest that caused instability in the electric system and led »

Power outage in Spain

Featured image The BBC headline sounds dire, “Spain declares state of emergency, as Portugal struggles with power cut, transport chaos.” In this case, the reality appears to match the media hype. At last report, “Power partially restored but disruption continues into the night.” The blackout appears to be a carbon copy of the “fire sale” plot of the 2007 movie Live Free or Die Hard (a/k/a Die Hard 4, Die Extra, Extra »

A Postscript to the Spanish Election

Featured image The Spanish election ended in a stalemate, and not much may change. But the AP seems to be worried that Spain is very close to re-establishing Francoist fascism, at least going from this chart showing the breakdown of the parties. Notice an asymmetry? For the media, the right is always “right & far right.” The left is always “left & center-left.” No such thing as a far-left, or center-right, exists »

Spain Goes to the Polls (Updated)

Featured image Spain is holding a national election today, and polls indicate right of center parties are in the lead. We should start getting results fairly soon. We’ll update this post as we get some actual vote counts and exit polls. In the meantime, cosmopolitan election-watcher extraordinaire Henry Olsen has a handy guide on Twitter to Spain’s political landscape you may wish to take in: Happy Spanish Election Day! Yes, today Spain »

A Spanish Trumpista?

Featured image We are fans of Italy’s new, populist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Now it appears that a similar figure is rising in Spain: Madrid’s President, Isabel Díaz Ayuso: Fresh from freeing Madrid from lockdown, Isabel Díaz Ayuso is waging a war on woke and seeking to turn Madrid into the “Florida of Europe” in a campaign that could ultimately lead to her becoming Spain’s first female prime minister. The “Florida of »

Proud all-Basque team wins Spanish Cup

Featured image On Sunday, Athletic Club Bilbao won the Spanish Super Cup. It accomplished this by defeating the two powerhouses of Spanish football — Real Madrid in the semifinal and Barcelona in the final. In the final, Athletic Bilbao trailed 2-1 but leveled the match in the 89th minute. It went on to score a 3-2 victory in extra time. Athletic Bilbao is a special team. Most European clubs are full of »

Some Wuhan coronavirus numbers from yesterday

Featured image Yesterday, March 30, the number of reported deaths in the U.S. from the Wuhan coronavirus passed 3,000. The current total, 3,141, exceeds the number of Americans killed on 9/11. No one knows how many Americans will die from this virus. However, the death toll is likely to be somewhere between 10 and 100 times that of 9/11. In Italy, the daily death count ticked upwards after two days of decline. »