In linguistics, noise is any interference, barrier, or disturbance that distorts, alters, or prevents the correct transmission and reception of a message between sender and receiver. In a way, we can say that noise is an alteration of the communication channel, so that the message cannot reach correctly from the sender to the receiver. A door in the middle of two rooms is noise. Lack of phone coverage when we are in Son Macià is noise. A parallel conversation at a table of people dining that sounds louder than your own is noise. Cataracts in the eyes that make it difficult for us to read a message on a screen could even be considered noise.

This week in Parliament, the Minister of Tourism, Jaume Bauzà, exclaimed with strong words at the fact that the opposition (in this case MÉS per Mallorca, through its spokesperson, Lluís Apesteguia) expressed the idea that public services should be prioritized for residents, over promotions for tourists. “They want to pay for their bicycles too”, the minister scandalized, and he sarcastically remarked: “If they are locals, if they vote here, red carpet. They don't overcrowd, they don't saturate, they can run everywhere. Beware, though, if they are from northern countries!”. He said all this with shouts that wouldn't have needed a microphone, and he finished it off with a very typical outburst: “Coño!”. Like other members of his executive, Bauzà seems to have trouble distinguishing when he is in Parliament or when he is at a picnic with friends in the countryside. It is said, incidentally, that this man is also the Minister of Culture.The idea that Minister Bauzà was trying to express is not exactly new either: it boils down to the fact that prioritizing the needs of residents over the leisure of tourists is a sin of selfishness. “Mallorcans, you live in paradise and you want it all to yourselves”: this phrase was often repeated during the SOS! Turisme campaign, in the years of the pandemic. The minister has added a quality touch, which consists of lamenting the good life that we residents enjoy, in contrast to the contempt suffered by the poor people who come to visit us from “northern countries”: these, as is well known, do nothing but endure impertinences, scowls, and tourismphobia. However, they continue to come, because they are selfless and good people, and they do so in ever-increasing numbers each year. All this, according to the minister, would have a clear electoral motivation, because –attention– residents vote here, these bastards. They do so, as can be seen, to maintain their status as an unjustly privileged caste, to the detriment of the suffering people “fro  northern countries”, who are always left in the corners. A tourist is no longer a friend, as in the old slogan. Now it would be: let us pity the tourist, to whom we owe everything and in return has nothing.On the other hand, immigrants who already live in the Balearic Islands and can now benefit from the regularization legislated by the Spanish government do not deserve such consideration. According to the denunciation of the Popular Party of Madrid, and as the Popular Party of the Balearic Islands obediently repeats, this regularization is once again an electoral maneuver, this time by the perfidious Pedro Sánchez, to win the votes of supposed grateful immigrants. This idea is misinformation, since regularized immigrants do not acquire the right to vote until they obtain Spanish nationality, a process that can be delayed for up to ten years. Worse than inventing false voters, however, is that the PP wants to spread the suspicion that all these regularized immigrants are potential criminals, “victimizers of women”, as Feijóo said, a man always overwhelmed by the circumstances. The criminalization of immigrants is, as everyone knows, a typical slogan of the far-right.The ranking of citizens, however, is clear. The worst are immigrants from the south, who are criminals, followed by residents, who are spoiled. Those, on the other hand, who have been underestimated, despite all they have done for these Islands, are our brothers from the northern countries. For them will be the attention of the Government and the promised land (served in succulent real estate promotions).

This weekend, while this column is published and read, the second germination of Earth Revolts will take place. Last year, the first one, was in Mont-roig del Camp (Tarragona) against a project that exemplifies the trap that green capitalism proposes to us to reinvent the ways it subjugates and conditions territories. Always under the blackmail of jobs and economic dynamization of the territory, it ends up colonizing them and turning them into sacrifice zones at the mercy of profit generation for large international financial capitals. In the case of Mont-roig it was Lotte, a Korean company that plans to implement an industry for the manufacture of a component for the lithium batteries that power the misguided energy transition of the global north.This year it is in Bages, where the company Israel Chemical Limited (ICL) has been exploiting salt mines for years that contaminate waters and lands with salt dumps and, at the same time, sponsors the genocide in Palestine. A company in whose activity ecocide and genocide go hand in hand.Both one and the other, accompanied in development by the competent institutions in turn and, in the second case, with the complicity and indulgence of the institutions in the face of non-compliance with judgments in which the company has already been convicted for environmental damage.From Mallorca, we have approached the Earth Uprising movements from the beginning. First, in meetings that periodically and for three years have been held on struggles in defense of the territory from all Catalan-speaking regions. These meetings have been the seed for the collective construction of a proposal that does not define itself as a coordinator of collectives, nor as a platform, but as a new dynamic of struggle. A dynamic that aims to spread like a mycelium underground, to nourish it with a common sense and feeling, and to emerge at any point where there is a territory that wishes to be defended against projects that threaten life (human and non-human). It is at these points that the germinations will materialize, where a massive confluence of organizations, collectives, and people are convened to confront the disaster, sharpen the challenges, and reorganize life. All, under other logics for inhabiting the earth without compromising the sustainability of life, and that this, precisely, be the political horizon of the desirable transformation of the way life and societies are organized in the territories that sustain it.This is why we learn together, mobilize together, organize together, to invent and reinvent, without ever losing hope, with other forms of relationship, other forms of resistance, other forms of collective construction and other forms of inhabiting the present and future together. Forms that draw on and recognize the learnings and paths that have preceded us, with a critical gaze that allows them to be transcended rather than fossilized, and that, at the same time, seek to become possibility and dispute the imaginaries of what is to be done, breaking the mental, action and interaction frameworks recognized until now. Forms that recognize the great and small struggles in defense of the territory, the ecological struggles, the conservationist struggles, the workers' struggles, those of popular and communalist organization, those of base communities and infrastructures, the anti-racist and decolonial struggles, the feminist struggles, those from other territories that we find inspiring. The latter range from those of organizations from the global south against global extractivism to the struggles coming from France or Germany, which deal with the occupation of territories, the reappropriation and resignification of what it means to inhabit land, bodies and territories, and which are characterized by massive direct actions that allow for very broad confluences of organized people to claim and defend life, the life of all, in a time of death.It will be an intense weekend to meet each other, recognize each other, organize ourselves, inhabit ourselves and inhabit the territory that welcomes us and that, in its welcome, recognizes us as part and with which we become a whole. A territory defending itself. Before it was Mont-roig, today it is Bages, tomorrow perhaps –and certainly, I would say– it will be Mallorca.Therefore, this year, we return and, in the following, we tell you about it.

What do you want, to sell a lot or to write well?Speaking of the difficulty of living off what I write, a colleague posed this painful question to me.Let's be clear: publishing houses are not charity organizations, but businesses like any other, they have to pay salaries and survive in a complex cultural context: surrounded by two very powerful cultures, the authors of this small country insist on writing in Catalan, without any powerful state to support us, with Portuguese institutions that don't quite believe in it, with booksellers who have limited space and receive new releases every week with the support of large groups with a powerful promotional machinery that usually prioritizes non-literary criteria.I suppose the goal would be to make culture in Catalan profitable. And this is where consumers have a lot to say. What books do you buy? Are you aware that we hold in our hands the most effective way to make Catalan culture profitable? Well, buy a lot of books, and buy books written in Catalan.To make an impact, I'll give you four and a half recommendations for books written by Balearic authors that, if we had a normal country, would be among the bestsellers.– Winter Sun. Dora Muñoz. Edicions Xandri. July 1939: a group of Majorcans heading to the popular Olympics in Barcelona found themselves caught between two worlds, quite literally: Republican Catalonia and Francoist Mallorca. They left for three days, which ended up being three years.Muñoz shows us her great versatility (have you read Errada de comptes, her latest crime novel? It's also fantastic!). Here she changes register and hooks us with a great command of narrative tension, which is not easy at all. Sol d’hivern is a story based on a real event, and life very often doesn't fit literary tempos, but Muñoz knows how to keep us hooked on the story.– How do you want, brothers, for me to sing? Joan Pons Bover is doing fantastic promotion for this novel, with a piercing lyricism, a tribute to lost loves, to the grief of what never was. Published by Illa Edicions, with two temporal arcs, from the desolate routine of a nursing home to the despair of losing one's first love in post-war Formentera. A breathtaking book, written with a careful and precious language that you won't be able to stop reading.

Thirteen months remain until the regional elections and all Balearic parties are already in full electoral campaign mode or, failing that, will be very soon.

When Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon on July 20, 1969, he uttered a phrase full of epic that would mark an era: “That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” As the past is romanticized and idealized through nostalgia, we believe today that the mission's objective to the satellite was knowledge or the conquest of space. But it was born out of pure rivalry with the Soviet Union. It was simply a geopolitical positioning within the space race.

April 26th is Lesbian Visibility Day. I like that April is highlighted, because I've always imagined that being a lesbian has something to do with violets and spring. It has been celebrated since 2008, just when I was walking through Barcelona, exploring the possibility of not being heterosexual. In case you need to buy books this month, I would like to pass on my enthusiasm for the latest one published by Sara Torres, it is titled El pensamiento erótico.

It was the gateway to paradise. Fresh, crystalline water, all shades of green, and fruit trees of every kind. It was, and is, right next to the Estella canal and the Company road. They called it Ca na Beatriu. The young couple spent their summers there, too hot in the city and in sa Pobla. In the summer house, one could hear the waves of the sea, of that immense, blue bay. The first tree they planted there was a cherry tree, as a symbol of purity –for its white blossom– and of love and fertility –for its intense red fruit. They had recently married in London, after meeting at the theatre owned by Mr. Aubyn, at 15 Bedford Row. In the fertile, black lands of l'Albufera, a cherry tree suggested the longed-for paradise or the desired reward. At Ca na Beatriu, the lady –as the Company laborers called her– commanded the ancient rhythm of the sleeping water.

The obsession with death that exists from certain interpretations of religious creeds and now from the so-called ultra-agenda – more or less stale conservatism – is indeed worrying and revealing. According to Christian religion, we would be told that our life does not belong to us, and therefore it is not right to want to die or end it when we sensibly wish. Life is a kind of divine gift, of which we are only custodians, like a wonderful book that is not ours and which we must return more or less intact to the Librarian Above. This may be so, or it could be, but the truth is that we have no certainty that things respond to these parameters. In the end, God does not manifest himself, but priests do. 

The entire island of Mallorca will end up being a large city. I first heard it about thirty years ago, and I couldn't say from whom. A spokesperson for GOB? A professor from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University? A militant from the PSM? It doesn't matter now.

When Israel and the US began the Iran war, last February 28, the whole world shuddered, but in Mallorca the shiver had a particular tone: “Will this affect the tourist season?”, was the question that the businessmen of the tourist sector and their servants, also known as elected rulers, were anxiously asking themselves. And many ordinary citizens, pure and simple taxpayers, were asking themselves the same question, because they have internalized an ancestral fear similar to that of the small Gallic village in the Asterix comics. Indeed, if those warriors of the Gallic forests lived in fear that one day the sky would not fall on their heads, many Majorcans today anxiously think about the possibility that one day tourists will stop coming. They have assimilated the idea that tourism is their source of sustenance (“tourism feeds us,” they repeat, like a responsorial psalm) and that dedicating themselves to economic activities other than tourism is equivalent to a return to a life of scarcity and deprivation. (Due to age, most have not experienced scarcity or deprivation, but within the repertoire of prejudices they have incorporated, it also includes intense aporophobia).Since then, the Iran war has continued its course, becoming more uncertain and alarming each day, and yet, tourists have come. With Easter, the tourist season properly begins: this year we can say, therefore, that the season runs from March 31 to October 31. That's seven full months, in contrast to the three months that the traditional summer season lasted (which was limited to the two strict months during which people usually took vacations, July and August, with the addition of the second fortnight of June to open and the first of September to close). Now it lasts more than double, and the long-standing objective is to make the tourist season last twelve months. Indeed, before we learned to say ‘de-seasonalization’’ without stumbling, reality has made it clear that it was a mirage: we will not manage to distribute tourists better across the different seasons of the year, in order to avoid overcrowding, but rather we will have overcrowding all year round. De-seasonalization was another self-deception (in this case, of progressive origin) on par with ‘cultural tourism’: by promoting this, we have not obtained tourists who come to participate in our reading clubs and buy season tickets for the Principal Theatre and the Manacor Auditorium, but rather tourists who visit prefabricated exhibitions, susceptible of being set up and visited in interchangeable destinations: be it Malaga (the model to be followed by our current rulers) or Palma, for buyers of the holiday package for lovers of cultural and gastronomic experiences.When Iran began to fire its long-range missiles, a local media outlet published a report trying to warn that these rockets have enough power for one of them to fall on Mallorca. And much worse, it could fall in the middle of the tourist season. There is a not very subtle (but well-rooted form of self-hatred), which consists of believing that we are too small to be affected by what happens in the world, or that our lamentable condition as a mature tourist destination makes us sweet and harmless. Neither is true: Mallorca, although a significant number of Majorcans find it hard to believe, is part of this convulsive, violent and unpredictable world that appears in the news. It is not only part of it, but it is a strategic point in the middle of the Mediterranean. And its tourist season is too.