<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - Opinion]]> 10 <![CDATA[Many little houses make a hell]]>

One of the most recurring images in the discourse of the Popular Party during the campaign for the last regional elections and the first part of this legislature was that of the 'little house' or 'plot of land' that many islanders supposedly inherit 'from their grandparents' and that they should be able to renovate, build on, and exploit as they wished. The idea was very simple, and surely consensual among the vast majority of society in favor of the most basic defense of private property: almost everything belongs to someone, and the very fact of this belonging gives that someone the right to do with it as they please, as long as it does not harm others or the general interest. Thus, according to the arguments defended by the PP, everyone should be able to do as they please with that 'little garden' inherited from their aunt in Son Sardina or that 'shack' that, if fixed up, could become a perfect container for the umpteenth proposal for holiday rentals. What happens, however, when these 'little houses', 'shacks', and 'little gardens' come to occupy a large part of the rural land of the Islands? What should we do when so many promises of paradise, together, end up destroying it beyond remedy?Just take the car or the bicycle and go for a drive through any urban center in the Balearic Islands to see how not only the centers themselves, but their surroundings, have been substantially transformed in the last three or four years. Where there used to be vacant lots between party walls, in towns and cities, there are now houses that imitate (only imitate!) traditional construction and offer courtyards with luxurious swimming pools, walls lined with marès stone and dry stone walls, and shutters decorated in the most fashionable pastel colors. And the same happens in the countryside: where there was a vegetable garden, in the best of cases, or practically abandoned land, a villa has now appeared, like a mushroom, now a house that distorts the architectural and nouveau riche style of Beverly Hills, now a swimming pool from which one can almost (or without the almost) see the neighbor's swimming pool.A house with a pool in the middle of the meadow is a privilege and a luxury reserved for very few people; especially for those who can afford it, often with foreign capital. On the other hand, a small house from which one sees another small house, where the noise of the gardener of another small house arrives, who hears the construction work, all summer long, of another small house… It can become a hell. Who will want to buy or rent houses in the Balearic Islands when idyllic homes supposedly in the middle of nature are the only landscape left to see? Who will want to come when natural resources have been depleted? How far must we go for owners (without even appealing to their eventual ecological conscience) to see that, if the trend does not change, their own businesses will go down the drain in five years, ten years, twenty, at most? Many small houses together are no longer many small houses: they are a little hell. And it's not that it's time to set limits, it's that we are already very late.

]]> <![CDATA[Triptych landed (III): … and the beautiful complexity of living]]> A pair of well-worn wings, displayed (ready to fly when needed or desired), on a shelf in the studio that Joan Miró built in Mont-roig del Camp, after falling in love with the landscape at eighteen. The photograph, exhibited at the Fundació Miró in Palma, is by Jean Marie del Moral: in black and white, it portrays the atrophied – but possible – limbs, with all the grays we never speak of. To cut off the wings, to mow the grass underfoot, to close all paths. The tongue warns against systematic evil and the artist rebels against it: bravely, he mutilates himself to coexist with the other mutilated, while carefully preserving ancestral limbs to roam freely through his work.

]]> <![CDATA[Automatic literature]]> Following a recent case of plagiarism of an article in the Catalan sphere, which the forger attributed to a mishap caused by AI, and a rather important Anglo-Saxon literary prize, which an author allegedly won also using AI, there has been renewed discussion in the world of literary creativity about what we will do from now on with texts that wish to circulate in the world, the authorship of which may be questioned by virtue of their possible algorithmic origin. For someone to use AI to write a literary piece can only be due to reasons related to their shortcomings as an intellectual or as a writer. For a true author, using AI to write would be like using skates to play football, when precisely the grace of the game is running. For me, having the machine write for me is equivalent to having a machine make love for me, or sending a robot to bed with the lover, simply because I'm lazy or I fear that this way I will look better in front of my beloved. It makes no sense to entrust a machine to do what gives us pleasure and lucidity, what makes us feel alive and intelligent. Furthermore, I doubt that any machine can currently write with the accuracy that good writers continue to have, but even if that point were reached in the near future, what the bot might tell us would also be of no interest, since it is literally no one and what ends up being interesting about literature and journalism is what a flesh-and-blood person thinks—or feels or sees—about it. A machine cannot tell me what I think about things, because it does not know. Thanks to AI, we might end up simulating an erudition that we do not have, or pretending to have read books we have not actually read, but that would not be a new imposture either. Cheaters are older than the printing press in this trade, and it was precisely the printing press that democratized writing and knowledge. AI is nothing more than a kind of automatic printing press, which produces text at the consumer's whim, which is not what writers end up doing; the role of intellectuals is precisely to remind us of what we do not want to remember, or to make us think about things that can give us a headache. When I see an AI questioning the fundamental ideas of the tribe, I will begin to get scared, but for the moment it is only the voice of the master, because we should not forget that all AI is nothing more than a form of business for those who give it a push. “We were clever enough to invent AI, and foolish enough to need it, and stupid enough that we can't figure out if we did the right thing…”; this was said by none other than the comedian Jerry Seinfeld in a recent interview. And we can think about whether he's right or not without AI. I, for one, still prefer to keep reading people who make mistakes, who doubt, who obsess, and even who self-destruct while writing, rather than a machine that simply calculates which sentence fits best with the preceding ones. Literature is not just text production: it is vanity, it is contradiction, it is a human consciousness trying to understand itself. And this, for better or for worse, cannot yet be automated. 

]]> <![CDATA[Crisis and crisis]]> In November 2008, I finished writing this introduction for an article for the magazine Lluc with the same title, which was published in issue 867 of January-March 2009: “Not all crises have the same etiology. There are conjunctural crises, which once the storm has passed, disperse and the sun shines again. However, there are true tsunamis, that devastate everything in their path and require a significant task of reconstructing the economic, social, and institutional architecture that orders our lives. I understand that the current crisis is not a conjunctural crisis, but rather that we are facing a true structural crisis or 'crisis of regulation' that will change our social imaginary, productive structures, and institutions on a national and international scale”.I sensed that important changes were coming, but not on the scale of what has happened to us in these last seventeen years in terms of the impact of recent technological revolutions: intensive use of the internet by a new generation of mobile phones and the creation of new applications to manipulate public opinion on an unthinkable scale, social polarization and, above all, since covid and the emergence of generative AI, an enormous concentration of scientific, economic and political power in very few hands, which would make Marx himself pale with his law of the concentration of capital.The first major technological revolution was that of agriculture, 10,000 years BC. According to Cristian Canton, associate director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the time until the massive social impact of the agricultural revolution took between 1000 and 4000 years. In terms of a technological system, it encompasses slavery and feudalism where wage labor does not exist and a few individuals concentrate maximum economic, political, and social power through the exclusive ownership of land and labor. Throughout this period until the modern age, writing and money were invented.With modern science and the Renaissance, Humanity moved towards the industrial revolution over a period that represents less than a tenth of the time it took for the agrarian revolution to achieve its massive impact. This period introduces revolutionary economic changes with the emergence of wage labor, capital accumulation, and leaving land rents in a marginal place. Not to mention the political and social sphere with the introduction of parliamentary democracies and the welfare state, without forgetting the scientific and technological advances: vaccination, printing press, aviation, electricity, railways, automobiles, telephones, antibiotics, nuclear energy, among others.And now we enter another major systemic change with generative AI, which has its precedent in the emergence of the web and the intensive use of the internet for more than twenty years now. Why is it a systemic change? Because the internet and its massive use to generate value through generative AI are at the base of the internet of things, robotization, financialization and tertiarization of the economy, and the geostrategy and security of states. And now all this is in a few hands that want to control everything, that is, power in capital letters and on a planetary scale. It is a revolutionary change that has come upon us suddenly at a surprising speed, less than ten percent of what it took to implement capitalism. As The Economist says in its latest issue of May 16: “Finally, humans could, like horses in the age of the car, become uneconomic. Incomes could go mostly or entirely to the owners of capital, who then spend it on things made by AI and robots using natural resources they monopolize. This dystopian possibility is behind the warnings from Silicon Valley that state intervention, and perhaps a Universal Basic Income (UBI), will be necessary”.It is not surprising that for this reason Pope Leo XIV signed, on Friday, May 15, his first encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas, on the protection of the human person in the era of artificial intelligence, where it is affirmed that the technological revolution of AI represents a social transformation of a magnitude comparable to that of the second industrial revolution.The dilemma is this: either a democratic way out of generative AI control by society and a UBI is proposed, or we can fall into capitalist neo-feudalism, that is, into a new barbarism where democracy and the control of capital and labor will once again fall into a few hands on a global scale.

]]> <![CDATA[Between 'lawfare' and post-truth]]> Since the Zapatero affair broke out, almost every day we are faced with a new surprise. Some, quite surreal. The feeling of disbelief is great even among those who for a long time put our heart and soul into the fight against corruption. But there are too many elements here that point to what has come to be called lawfare, the use of 'justice' to criminalize and bring down politicians, particularly progressives, through a lot of disinformation and little evidence. It happened with Lula in Brazil, and we have seen it in the Kingdom of Spain with the leaders of the Procés, the comrades of Podem, and a couple of years ago, with the case of our friend Mònica Oltra, who already warned us that we could all be, like her, victims of infamous maneuvers to civilly kill those who stand up to defend progressive values.

]]> <![CDATA[Moha]]> Not too many days ago I had a bump with the car. Nothing of great importance, more than a slightly dented door and the documentary and management hassle that the thing entails in the following days. This week I went to the workshop assigned to me by the insurance company to have it appraised. A workshop run by Manacor people of the kind they now call 'of a lifetime'. 'You'll have to wait a little, because the young man who takes care of it starts at nine', and I went back into the car and spent some time there scrolling through my mobile phone.After a few minutes, "the young man who takes care of it" appeared, smiling. "I'll take a couple of photos and send them to the house. If they don't see any signs of fraud, we'll move forward and you won't have to bring it back until we have to fix it," he told me amiably. We entered the office: "I'll jot down my direct number for you," and he gave me a card with a name written by hand. I'm not wearing my glasses. "Who should I ask for?" "Moha," he told me.If you had heard us, you would not have made any difference. Both of us adapting to the slightly formal and a little distant and cordial tone that the communicative situation required. Both of us in a 'lifelong' Manacor Catalan. Basically, because both of us are, 'lifelong' Manacor residents, from my life and from hers.And we'll leave it at that, I'll call him. There's no more difference between Moha and me than the origin of the name, within the professional relationship we've had. Obviously, then each to their own home, and the dogs to Coll's, as they say. Already in the car, I delve into my linguistic and cultural musings. I've thought about our great-grandparents in Havana, or in Buenos Aires, which are the two mythical names with which people of a certain time summarized the Majorcan diaspora in America. How must they have done it? They must have learned and spoken the language of the place, of course. But they must have looked for each other, they must have formed a community. What language did they speak to their children, if they formed a family there? All sorts of situations must have occurred. It depended on whether both parents were from here or not, whether they saw themselves returning to Mallorca someday, whether they thought that to ensure the future in the new land it was convenient to speak to them in Spanish or whether, on the contrary, they didn't want their children to lose the language their parents had taught them in any way.Just like all the people who arrive in Mallorca and who right now represent a third of the population. The narratives, depending on who articulates them, use different, sometimes antagonistic vocabularies: “coexistence”, “interculturality”, “integration”, “assimilation”, “cultural substitution”, “invasion”...We are moving in slippery terrain that allows for two interpretations: the most raw and uninhibited capitalism has settled within our homes. It is as if the United States had disembarked its model directly on this small island of ours in the middle of the Mediterranean. Incessant and tumultuous movements of population to feed the monetary greed of a handful of new rich and speculators, so that they can continue to pluck the golden goose of tourism on the backs of others; and a society divided into isolated communities, into stagnant ghettos that seek no other bond than the commercial or labor one, and even then. Rootedness and sense of belonging are weak. It is a way to keep communities poorly anchored to the territory, with no interest in defending it, and divided, with no possibility of organizing collectively, of uniting for a common cause, of questioning this or that policy together.However, let's talk about the second reading. Languages and cultures can be linked to a territory, but they can also be linked to a community. Neither of these two assumptions makes them better than others. Nor worse. All cultures, all languages, are necessary to sustain the global 'lingosystem'. Each way of speaking represents a way of understanding and interpreting the world. As humans, we cannot afford to do without any. Neither the others', nor our own. No one is in a position to tell another what language to speak, nor what form their cultural expressions should take. And we Catalan speakers in Mallorca know this well, because, however little we want to keep the presence of the language alive, we come up against ignorance, contempt, and affront.The singer and creator Joana Gomila (what would we do without her?) recently gave us a new idea: the right to cultural opacity. The idea is from the thinker from the island of Martinique, Édouard Glissant, who says that people, cultures, and languages do not have the obligation to be completely transparent or understandable to others. The idea of "translating everything" into one's own frameworks is very much linked to a way of understanding the world that is very colonial, perhaps even supremacist.Let's think of all of us, of all the Majorcans of today, those who were born here and those who have come. Whatever their lineage and their names. All have the right to preserve an irreducible part of their culture, the right not to be completely translatable, the right to exist without having to justify themselves according to external categories. Let's think about it, we Catalans of Mallorca, for ourselves, in this essential depth of our way of seeing and understanding the world. If we do, we will be more capable of empathizing also, for that very reason, with all this otherness that is now so ours, so from here, and that does not arrive as a threat to dilute us, but as an opportunity to make us richer, and I'm not talking about money.Because suspicion, obsession, and hatred, in general, are not usually cultural, even though the Spanish far-right, and now also the Catalan one, want to dress it up as such. Hatred, obsession, and suspicion, unfortunately, are class-based and the rejection of difference is arbitrary and depersonalizing.Moha's case from the workshop sends me back to school, which is, for now, the only meeting space we have managed to set up. That's where this normality comes from. From there, empathy must be able to emerge and suspicion towards difference must be dismantled. And from there, the building material we need must be able to emerge to construct the necessary bridges and meeting spaces, also in adult life, to become a plural, healthy society and, yes, call me naive, with the Catalan language as the backbone of it all.

]]> <![CDATA[Pride of Pride]]>

The human "pocatraça" has no limits and the Palma City Council is a good example of this. It is enough to listen to a plenary session to confirm that the municipal government does not like groups that are on the margins of what it considers a decent society very much. Cort has not shown much esteem for immigrants, shack dwellers, caravanners, or street artists – at this point, it is worth making a digression: if it is not very, very, very expensive, for the City Council it is not art.

]]> <![CDATA[In defense of B. Picornell, anti-Nazi]]> These days it has emerged that Balti Picornell had been summoned to testify following a complaint filed by the Vox deputy in Madrid, Jorge Campos. The reason: having taken a photo next to a graffiti that read “J. Campos, fucking Nazi”.

]]> <![CDATA[Prohens' and OCB's friendly song]]>

More than one reader has sent us comments about the image where the President of the Government and the OCB representative are seen talking amicably at the popular singing event of La Balanguera. The head of the Executive's communication council did not waste time posting on social media the image where Prohens even puts her hand on Antoni Llabrés's shoulder, when it should be remembered that the president has not stopped eroding the demands for Catalan and has even forced the OCB to go to court.

]]> <![CDATA[Mallorca Live: culture cannot be an excuse]]>

Public investment in culture is not only legitimate, it is necessary. No country or society with the slightest collective ambition can leave culture exclusively in the hands of the market. Institutional support for cultural projects serves to guarantee plurality, access, social cohesion and external projection. But precisely because public resources are limited and come from all citizens, investment must respond to criteria of proportionality, transparency and general interest. It is here that the case of Mallorca Live raises alarms.

]]> <![CDATA[If you don't explain it to me]]>

If they don't explain to me what it means, what advantages it has, and what it can mean to live in a large metropolitan area of Palma, right off the bat, I don't want to live there. I don't want to be part of it.

]]> <![CDATA['Malle']]>

‘Malle’ is Mallorca. Thus, with this word, ‘Malle’, the slogan of a huge advertising billboard that you can see on the facade of the Son Sant Joan airport car park refers to the island, and which has caused disgust due to the idea it conveys about Mallorca, as a place of uncontrolled tourism where anything goes and one doesn't need to be picky about anything. You can read in ARA Balears's chronicle by Aina Vidal about the billboard and the controversy it has generated.The slogan in question is written only in German: “Was auf Malle passiert, wird auf Malle beglichen”, that is, “What happens in Mallorca is settled in Mallorca”. The reference to “settlement” is understandable because the advertising company is Wero, a digital payment service —like PayPal and Bizum— designed to operate within Europe. The advertisers' ingenuity cannot be disputed. What they are trying to tell German tourists (who are the target audience of the advertisement) is: “pay for your parties in Mallorca with Wero”. Pardon: not “in Mallorca”, but “in Malle”. What does “Malle” have to do with Mallorca?” It has to do with the fact that it is a diminutive, a kind of nickname that aims to be affectionate and at the same time roguish, for a place of ill repute. It plays on the reference to Las Vegas (the famous phrase ‘what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas’) and simply starts from the idea that Mallorca is a destination for beach, sex, and drunkenness tourism. It is not the equivalent of Mallorqueta or sa Roqueta, bland and prim denominations, which the most smug Majorcans still use to reduce themselves to a commonplace (which is not the same as a toilet). Malle has a resonance more of party, more nocturnal, more rowdy. It is the diminutive that the vicious but not very vicious, those who allow themselves an excess from time to time because they can afford it, give to the place they go to be naughty without having to give explanations. This is Malle: an island where it doesn't matter if it's five or fifty, where you don't have to worry about anyone being offended by your behavior, because what they want is for you to go there to lose yourself. All you need is money in your current account and a digital platform for small payments to cover the cost of your vice. The rest is secondary, starting with the native population of Malle, a completely irrelevant and despicable people, starting with their language. It is possible that you may encounter some of these natives, but do not pay the slightest attention to them.All this is also stated by Wero's sign on the facade of the Son Sant Joan car park: not in the text but in the subtext and context, which are equally important. To advertise like this (without even respecting that signage, by law, must be at least in Catalan, and also in Spanish) is an act of arrogance and contempt for which Aena is also responsible, allowing its advertisers to advertise in this way (the same Aena that also wants to double the capacity of Ibiza airport, because it is the main competitor in the race to finish squeezing the Balearic Islands and the Pitiusas until the last drop of juice they can give). The main responsible parties, however, are we Majorcans ourselves, who for decades have persisted in presenting ourselves as an island of greedy people fascinated by easy money, to the point of allowing anyone who fancies it to advertise at the airport —the gateway to the island, the first thing anyone arriving finds— saying that this place here is ca na Brutes and that it doesn't matter to suffer for anything, the only thing to do is pay and no one will say a peep. The saddest thing is that they are right. Welcome to Malle, Majorcans.

]]> <![CDATA[The grammar of security]]> Donald Winnicott (1896-1971), a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, intuited and studied that the need for security accompanies human beings from the first moment of life. He explained the need to feel "held" by the environment in order to grow and live with confidence.Literally ‘to hold’ in English means: ‘to sustain’, ‘to contain’, ‘to protect with the hands’. But Winnicott gave it a much deeper psychological meaning. When a small child is physically and emotionally held by the mother, is fed, protected, comforted and understood, they develop a basic sense of trust in the world. This is what Winnicott called ‘holding’. They have the intimate feeling that the world will not collapse under your feet. Thanks to this ‘held environment’, the child can play, explore, grow and build themselves. Without this ‘holding’, anguish, insecurity and emotional fragility appear. On a social and global level, societies also need a kind of ‘holding collective’. I mean that we like to feel that there is order, to have reliable institutions, accepted and shared norms, a certain stability and an invisible network that sustains this coexistence. If this support fails –or we perceive that it fails– then the obsessive demand for security arises. It may sound daring, but security is not just about having police or not having crime. It is also trust, cohesion, a certain credibility, a sense of identity belonging... It is having the perception that someone upholds the collective framework. Perhaps modern societies are not only seeking more security, but to recover the feeling of ‘holding’: feeling that the world is still capable of holding them.Why have I chosen The grammar of security as the title of this article? Well, because security is also a language. There are symbols, emotions, perceptions, narratives, and even scenographies of power. We must be able to talk about security without falling into alarmist discourse, nor into the naivety of denial. How can we reconcile the need for protection and the boundaries between freedom and control? I also chose the word 'grammar' because it was very recently that I discovered the figure and legacy of Gianni Rodari, and I have been fascinated by him. In confidence, The grammar of security transmits resonances of The Grammar of Fantasy. Winnicott fits in perfectly, and applying it to a social and contemporary topic seemed audacious to me.Let's refine a bit more; in sa Pobla –in any town– when we see a dirty square, a broken streetlight, a dark street, we observe how it is transmitting an emotional message to the population. And in the face of these real events that trouble us so much on social networks, the theory of James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling fits in very well, which more or less stated that small signs of disorder can generate the perception of abandonment and insecurity even if the real level of delinquency or criminality is low. Obviously, the use of current information channels can be manipulated and redirected towards the interests of corporations, political parties, etc. It is one of the important challenges facing current societies: the abuse of manipulation and easy populism. This abuse in order to achieve "power". It seems we have reached one of the most poignant paradoxes we have today: "The more protected a society is, the less tolerant it is of uncertainty"". But, deep down, in a very internalized space, over the years of my police activity I have observed that people do not just ask for physical protection. They ask to feel that the world is still understandable, orderly, and governable. We return to my town; last April, in sa Pobla, four low-intensity criminal acts, or minor delinquency, occurred. The perpetrator was quickly identified and brought before the judicial authorities; he was a repeat offender and quite well-known. Some of the affected parties and others used social media and amplified their fear. Some political parties saw an opportunity to gain visibility, increase their presence, and use it for political purposes. This happens every so often, almost cyclically. It is certainly legitimate, but in reality – dealing with a sensitive issue – they are 'playing' with the emotions and fears of the citizens. The result was that in the following weeks there was an increase in the perception of insecurity and fear among the townspeople. Evidently, political consensus among all forces on security matters has not yet matured enough and – at the municipal level – it is practically non-existent. The defense and joint work for the citizens will still have to wait.However, let's stop and get to the facts. The municipality of sa Pobla, its town hall, has allocated an average of between 10% and 11% of its initial budget to citizen security in the last five years. This is a relatively high ratio if we compare it to the rest of the municipalities in Spain. This means that – for the governing team – it has been an important priority when designing its municipal policies. Each inhabitant of Huialfàs spends approximately one hundred and five euros annually on local security. State-level security expenses are outside these figures. This would be an objective fact, but it is very far from the perception that many people from sa Pobla have.There is a lot of work to do and –above all– a lot of work to explain, to make understood. Personally, I would like to delve into the next article on the role played by the Local Police and our privacy that we are losing, in this complex and interesting mosaic. To summarize, we can conclude that the great drama of modern societies is not only real insecurity, but the constant need to feel protected. And the inevitable question that remains is: Why does an objectively secure society continue to be so afraid?Note: This week I have ended my labor and social contract with the Local Police of sa Pobla. It has been more than forty-four years of dedication. In the beginning, I was a young man with more curiosity than training, these were different times. I have tried to give back to my town all that it has given me. The feeling of gratitude is enormous. The finite landscape and the faces of the people who have already departed have also accompanied me. I have made mistakes many times and I apologize to those I may have hurt or harmed. Life goes on and we need to savor it and share it. Until the next article, thank you.

]]> <![CDATA[Menorca is experiencing a delicate water situation and water is an increasingly scarce resource]]> Just like in all of Menorca, excessive consumption and waste by some large consumers have made the situation of the well water reserves increasingly difficult, and the update on the state of the aquifers sadly confirms this.It is within this context that in 2016 Ara Maó promoted a proposal for tariff reorganization that aims for those who misuse it to pay more, while citizens who have reasonable consumption see their collaboration recognized with a reduction in the price of the water bill.After overcoming judicial appeals from those who defend large consumers, this issue has now been resumed within the framework of the negotiation agreements between the current municipal government and Ara Maó to approve the budgets. Our electoral group has set a series of measures aimed at addressing the water problem at its source as conditions.For these reasons, in the plenary session of May, this reordering of tariffs was brought for definitive approval, which aims to put an end to the waste of a few that harms us all and to help citizens who make good use of them.Thus, the first tiers will see the price of water reduced and the last ones will see a progressive and significant increase with the aim of provoking a change of mentality in excessive uses. Tropical gardens, lawns, uncontrolled swimming pools, water for cleaning rental vehicles and boats, as well as any unnecessary use will be the target of this increase.Because not all consumption can be treated the same. It is not acceptable that on an island with limited water resources, water continues to be consumed disproportionately without consequences. Those who waste water or use it excessively must pay more. Not as an arbitrary penalty, but as a matter of environmental justice and social responsibility.Menorca is experiencing a delicate water situation and water is an increasingly scarce resource. Precisely for this reason, the new tariff structure incorporates an element that is indeed worth defending: the reduction of the first consumption tiers.This is added to another of the agreements that has been negotiated: the launch of the denitrifiers of Malbúger and Sant Climent must serve to achieve the objective of providing water with the parameters set by health to the entire municipality.Menorca cannot afford to continue acting as if water were infinite. Every summer, the strain on aquifers, the impact of tourism growth, and the urgent need to address the situation with sustainability criteria become more evident. Citizens must act with awareness, and institutions must drive policies to improve the situation.We must continue to promote other actions, such as improving connections, reducing losses, controlling illegal wells, meters for large irrigation systems, reviewing tourism growth, utilizing wastewater, and collecting rainwater, among others. In several cases, other public administrations must be involved. However, in the rearrangement of tariffs, municipalities have full competencies and can intervene quickly.Conxa Juanola Pons

]]> <![CDATA[Elections are smelled]]> In the Balearic Islands, no elections have been called yet, but the characteristic smell of pre-campaign is already in the air: more headlines, more polls, more visits to markets and fairs, and more politicians promising that, now yes, they have understood what really worries people...

]]> <![CDATA[Troy trans]]> Before it has premiered, everyone is already talking about it… I'm thinking about the version of theOdyssey that Christopher Nolan has filmed, which will be seen on the big screens next July. We already know that before this director, one of the most in-form cinematic artists of recent decades, had signed the story ofOppenheimer and before the adventures of Batman. The controversy is being generated by all those on social media who oppose certain roles being played by certain actors. Thus, the rumor – which seems to have been confirmed – that Helen of Troy will be played by a Black actress, Lupita Nyong'o, and that Elliot Page (formerly Ellen Page), a transgender man, might end up playing, no less than, the warrior Achilles. Recently, a new version of Mozart's life has premiered on television –Amadeus, on Skyshowtime – and I saw that the Salzburg genius was (magnificently) played by Will Sharpe, who is half Japanese, and that the Jewish and Italian librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte and the Austrian musician Süssmayr, who finished the Requiem, were played by Black actors. All of this might have been laughable a few years ago; right now it is motivating parodies on X, in which, however, a supposed injustice is highlighted: that we would never allow a historical Black character to be played by a white actor, like for example an Obama biopic embodied by Simón Andreu. If skin color doesn't matter, how can we defend ourselves if we are anti-racist, why is it concerning that Helen of Troy is played by a Black woman (even if she's very beautiful)? And it is evident that behind this there is a lot of guilty conscience and that from the cultural industries there is a desire to bet not only on diversity in jobs – and to give everyone a role in global productions: to satisfy quotas – but to compensate for the invisibility of race in past films. Even though this leads us to show a Mozart's Vienna with more racial diversity than today's New York, distorting the historical narrative, just as Clint Eastwood distorted it when he didn't include any black soldiers in the films he shot almost twenty years ago about World War II, it is also not well regarded that there are no women in the plot, even though a war or gangster film might force us to (think of Scorsese's filmography). It is no longer about representing 'reality', but about making a mirror that projects not what we are, but what we would like to be, and that no matter how much it questions our weaknesses as a species, it does so at least without forgetting that we are different, plural and supposedly fair in castings, no matter how much this form of justice now leads us to falsify a past that yes, for art has always been an excuse. As Hitchcock said: “Cinema is four hundred empty seats”, that is to say, more than an art, it is an audience above all else, and it will be this audience that decides whether or not to accept these liberties. And I think that not only does it accept them, but it asks for them, or celebrates that the work also obliges it to take a stance even before buying the ticket and enjoying it. 

]]> <![CDATA[To love Mallorca is also to take care of the GOB]]>

Surely these days you have heard about GOB Mallorca. This writing aims to explain why a group of 10 women resigned from the board of directors on May 22 at the extraordinary assembly of the entity: a resignation that does not respond to differences regarding the defense of the territory or environmental campaigns, but rather to a sustained internal situation of confrontation, personal wear and tear, and lack of respect that has made the continuity of the project we defended unsustainable.

]]> <![CDATA[The nun aunt]]> In our home, as I suppose in 70% of Mallorcan families during the 20th century, we had a nun aunt. Ours was my grandfather's sister. I had always called her “the nun aunt”, but she had a civil name: Magdalena Bernat Gomila, and she was from the congregation of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary (forgive the pomposity of the name).

]]> <![CDATA[The extinction of the lizards]]> The Pitiusa lizard (a little animal that needs no introduction to anyone who has set foot on Ibiza or Formentera) is in an advanced state of extinction, according to research by the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF) published in the scientific journal Ecology. The reason for this situation is the introduction to these islands of a species of snake, called the horseshoe snake, which is a predator of lizards and has literally devastated them in Ibiza, where it already occupies 90% of the habitat. The horseshoe snake is a snake that can grow up to two meters long and is capable of swimming, so it also moves to nearby islets to continue devouring the lizards it finds there. The destruction is so advanced that very soon, perhaps this very summer, the population of Pitiusa lizards may be considered extinct. Obviously, this has an ecological impact that is in no way minor. The extinction of endemic species, such as the lizard in Ibiza and Formentera, leads to a serious alteration and impoverishment of the entire ecosystem of the area.Another piece of evidence is that the horseshoe whip snake, no matter how well it swims, did not reach the Pitiuses on its own. It has done so (the same CREAF study documents it) through the importation of olive trees. Olive trees to repopulate the island's forest park? No: olive trees as decorative trees to embellish chalets and second homes, like palm trees and other species that tend to be to the taste (of terrible taste) of the inhabitants of urbanizations, coastal municipalities, and other dreamlike environments. 'Chaletism', as Miquel Cardell calls it, is a peculiar religion, which also demands its ritual sacrifices. Among them, the importation of foreign trees that often arrive infested or inhabited by specimens of invasive species.The lizard-eating snakes give us such a transparent metaphor that it doesn't even need explaining. It's an example of how a society that bases its way of life on consumption and idiotic ostentation ends up destroying its environment (and therefore harming itself, as a society) without even being aware of it. Even worse, a society made up of individuals who, when warned of the destruction they cause, react by taking refuge in denialism, questioning the authority of scientists and attributing dark interests to them. An infantilized society, made up of adults convinced they have the right to everything (to whatever they please) and no responsibility towards others, with no idea of the common good or desire to have one, and who get angry and throw tantrums when someone tries to show them what they are doing wrong.The extinction of lizards invites us to think about our own extinction, but not at the hands of immigrants arriving by raft, but under the weight of the greed of many of our fellow citizens. Politicians are not entirely responsible: those who live on Mediterranean islands that were once privileged, thinking they are merely stages for their whims, also have a fundamental part in it. If they are told anything, they will still answer that they have already paid taxes (many of them do whatever it takes not to pay them). Many Majorcans, Minorcans, Ibizans and Formenterans have a relationship with money – an obsession – that is pathological, harmful, toxic, and destructive. Even the lizards know this.

]]> <![CDATA[You buy yourself many books!]]> The moment always comes when someone I know tells me, “You buy so many books!” Then the interrogation begins: if I read them all, how many do I have in the pile of unread books (‘the pile’ is an understatement, I have a shelf of unread books), what do I do when there’s no time for anything, why don’t I get them from the library, where do I put them, etc., etc., etc. Sometimes I’m in the mood and give explanations. Afterwards, I regret having justified myself. And it’s not about the books. It’s because they are my things, they don’t hurt anyone, and I like doing them.

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