In response to a pertinent question from Jéssica Albiach (Comuns) to Salvador Illa about the hell of the AP-7, during the control session of the Government, the president distributed responsibilities by saying that it was necessary to "reflect on what we said light-heartedly and see what is happening now", and that "perhaps we were wrong" with the elimination of tolls.

Sometimes, and especially from some political positions, the incorporation of immigrants into the labor market is presented as a zero-sum game. This means, according to game theory, that what some gain, others lose, and vice versa. From the most radical positions, newcomers are labeled as a threat to natives in the labor and social sphere. If many arrive, they take jobs at the expense of the native-born population, they claim. And they are also identified as greater beneficiaries of public benefits than contributors and payers.

A few days ago, the group Fades announced via Instagram that they had to cancel the concert in Vilassar de Mar on June 23 after several people in the audience threw ice cubes onto the stage during the performance. It is sometimes difficult to ascertain the motive for an assault, but intuition rarely fails to determine its origin: in this case, it could be hatred of the queer expression they embody or the defense they champion of the Catalan language and culture. They can also know this because they constantly receive, daily, threats of this kind through social networks. The next day, many media outlets reported the news and, like the group's own statement, linked the assault to the rise of the far-right.I am now writing these lines with many doubts. Firstly because far right has become a term as imprecise and worn out as mental health, housing crisis or neoliberalism. We use it constantly thinking we know what we are referring to, but it barely denotes any certainty. We could imagine the profile of a person who threatens a music group on social media or who, later, assaults them during a concert: it could be someone who has meditated the attack; someone who, in an improvised way, has felt confident enough to start throwing ice cubes; someone who has made violence a form of seduction; someone who has let themselves be carried away by their environment, in a kind of initiatory ritual that involves hatred of difference. Some must be militants of the far right and must agree, without cracks, with their political imaginary. It would be wonderful if that were the case, in fact: we would know who they are, what they think, what they want. It happens, however, and I am sure, that many of them are not followers of Vox or Aliança Catalana: perhaps they follow incel gurus on the internet, perhaps they feel infinite frustration, perhaps they only know how to express some feeling if it is from phobia and aversion, perhaps they are resentful uneducated people or perhaps they are fans of the new retrograde centennial binarism. No idea. I am not writing now to understand who they are, what they think, what they want. What I believe unites them all, those who now insult and later will call for raids, is a severe sense of legitimacy in the public agora, and here lies, in my opinion, one of our great challenges. They all feel that they can do it as they could not do it a few years ago, that they have finally recovered a freedom lost by political correctness and leftist do-goodism, by the progressive feminist agenda that, according to them, has gone against their well-being. Extreme right aside, the war, here, is about discourse and language: there are those who believe that their truths can now be expressed with sovereignty, freedom, and a broad approach. They can take the floor because no one disputes it, they can occupy the space as they please because there is no one left defending it.I was ruminating on these things when, a few days ago, while this was just happening in Vilassar, I was having dinner with a publisher in the Pyrenees who told me, convinced, that one of the evils of our time is that we who dedicate ourselves to the word (writers, publishers, poets, journalists...) do not take it. We censor reprehensible conduct with some quick tweet, a brief article (like this one) and little else. And lucky, in fact, if we do. Many times we are stopped by self-censorship, fear, imposed shame, paralysis. Thus, the feeling widens that the public agora, where discourses are found, where bodies are found, is empty, desolate, ready to be paved with the cobblestones of hate. What I wonder, today too, is what would happen if, in cases like this, instead of the organizers reading a manifesto after the aggression and some media publishing the news, feigning dismay, a group of people surrounded the aggressors, denounced them or, simply, with the desire to take the word, to reclaim common space, and much more effectively, broke their legs. But we won't do it, of course.

The Minister of Territory, Sílvia Paneque, has presented the "first Railway Services Plan of Catalonia", which states it will organize and reorganize the railway system (and by extension, the mental health and family life of the beloved Antonio Carmona). I read that they will put on more trains, that they will double the kilometers of track, that they will rethink "the timetables, routes, and frequencies of Commuter, medium-distance, and high-speed trains", and that they want to implement "regular and repetitive timetables, easy for passengers to remember, along with the improvement and increase of frequencies throughout the network". And it all seems very good to us that they are moving forward. And that they put on trains, yes. However, that they want – as a plan – to implement repetitive and easy-to-remember timetables for passengers will keep me erotically charged from head to toe until I get my pink card.

Going to the beach and enjoying a good swim without the risk of contaminated water seems like the most natural thing in the world to us, but a few years ago it was unthinkable. On the beaches of the Llobregat delta, for example, swimming was prohibited because the water from this river reached them, one of the most polluted in Europe along with the Anoia. But all this changed thanks to a European Commission regulation, the Llobregat delta beaches, without going any further, swimming was prohibited because the water from this river reached them, one of the most polluted in Europe along with the Anoia. But all this changed thanks to a European Commission regulation, the Water Framework Directive, which since 2000 has recognized the importance of rivers for the sea, as a vital source of nutrients for marine life and sediments for the coast.Now this directive is at risk. The same European Commission that promoted it has raised a reform that can weaken it. The its proposal implies increasing the possibilities that projects considered "strategic" may prevail over current environmental legislation. Currently, member states can already request exceptions to compliance with certain directive obligations, but only in very specific and justified circumstances. The reform aims to broaden this margin of exception and adapt it to the new strategic priorities of the European Union. This could facilitate the authorization of projects linked to the extraction of critical raw materials (mainly for the production of various renewable energies) or related infrastructure for defence and security. These changes pose a huge contradiction with the current situation, given that, precisely now, measures have been approved to reduce polluting substances such as PFAS and microplastics in water, and we are also paying daily fines to the European Commission itself for not comply with the required levels of sanitation and water saving.If this reform is approved, there is a very clear risk: moving from a directive model based on the protection of aquatic ecosystems to a model that normalizes their degradation. And this would have direct consequences not only for rivers and aquifers, but also for the health of terrestrial and coastal ecosystems, and for people's daily lives.Therefore, this debate is more than a legal issue. It is about choosing what model of relationship we want to have with water. The Water Framework Directive introduced a paradigm shift: water is not managed solely with economic and political criteria, but places ecological criteria at the center to ensure the health of aquatic ecosystems and prevent their degradation.

While waiting for the Constitutional Court to rule on the educational linguistic legal framework (May-June 2022), we have learned of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) decision not to admit the lawsuit filed by a group of parents from the Turó del Drac school in Canet de Mar against the ruling of the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC; October 2023) which obliged a class group to receive an additional core subject in Spanish due to the request of a student's family.It was not an isolated incident: there were twenty-two centers in the same circumstances. The date of the ruling, however, is relevant. It is subsequent to the decision of the TSJC itself (July 2022), which suspended the execution of a ruling from December 2020 that no longer affected a single center, but rather imposed 25% Spanish in the entire educational system following the challenge of the enrollment regulations for the 2015-2016 academic year. The TSJC had to reluctantly acknowledge that the parameter used to enforce the 25% was incompatible with the new legal framework, which established Catalan as the vehicular language and Spanish as a curricular subject. Nevertheless, disagreeing with this, it took the matter to the TC, as did the PP.The case of the Canet school and others is explained, therefore, by the stubbornness —and the cunning— of some judicial bodies to continue questioning the linguistic model in this waiting period. They have done so by perpetuating the guerrilla warfare in some centers, under the pretext that the new laws did not affect judicial decisions previously made provisionally. In this context, although the appropriateness of the decision can be debated, the parents of Turó del Drac filed an appeal with the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court. Once admitted, without entering into the merits, they went to the ECHR, which, through a decision, also dismissed it. The decision was made by a committee of the 5th section, a body that usually resolves these types of incidents if the claims are considered manifestly unfounded or raise issues already resolved by jurisprudence. It must be assumed that, in this determination, one of the three members of the committee has played a significant role: the Spanish María Elósegui, appointed in 2018 from a shortlist proposed by the PP, with a very conservative profile and the right to act as a "national" judge because it is a case brought against Spain.

Good discoverers of garlic soup, our Mr. Esteve's Trumpists point out very excitedly that the tremendous inoperability shown by Venezuelan public services in facing the tragedy of the double earthquake is a direct consequence of the corruption of the Chavista regime. That Chavismo was, and is, corrupt to the bone is an unquestionable truth; we thank them for their clarity. It is a pity that the sharp analysts of the wretched right-wing forget that Venezuela has been a kind of protectorate of the USA and the Trump administration for half a year, which they usually find so admirable. The incursion of American troops and special forces on January 3 in Caracas was a real coup d'état and a wild and blatant violation of international law, in line with the role of global sheriff that Trump likes to play so much.In these six months, it's not that the Yankee government has done anything to free Venezuelans from the Chavista dictatorship: it's that it has maintained it just as it was, with the only difference being that we have heard nothing more about Nicolás Maduro (he is locked up, awaiting trial, at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, or so they say) and that in his place is now his former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. She and the rest of Chavismo remain intact in power, only in the role of US puppets, which Delcy Rodríguez and her colleagues do not care about at all because they completely disregard what dignity might be. The other big difference —the only fundamental difference— is that now Venezuela's oil is in the hands of the US: Venezuela has ceded up to about 50 million barrels of crude oil that Washington directly markets, with profits of about 2.8 billion dollars. (Trump must be credited with a funny moment, when he let María Corina Machado, idol of the Spanish and Catalan right, know that he did not count on her as president of the new/old government, a snub to which she responded by offering to share the Nobel Peace Prize, as if it were a hamburger with double bacon.)After being impetuously freed from the dictatorship, the Venezuelan citizenry continues to be as screwed, mocked, and helpless as ever. And when tragedy struck in the form of an earthquake, the US government's aid was crumbs (at least Venezuelans can be grateful they weren't sent J.D. Vance to make things even worse). We have learned —you can read it in this newspaper— that Trump has increased his personal fortune by 1.4 billion dollars during the first year of his return to the presidency, thanks to the cryptocurrency business. His emulator Milei also encouraged Argentinians to invest in a cryptocurrency, and it was a fraud. Since they imitate the MAGA movement down to the pattern on the curtains, it's only a matter of time before some of the brains in Spanish politics, after some economics master's degree, tries a crypto-scam from within the institutions. How bad is Chavismo.

I love Barcelona very much, despite the difficulties. That the news in the city now is the resistance of two lifelong bars to change the two old signs on their facades because they are larger than the municipal ordinance stipulates is a joke compared to all the easily observable infringements, such as the disgrace of the tacky signs and the blinding lighting of the 24-hour supermarkets (which, by the way, no one can explain how they manage to pay the rent for a central location), which are an insult to Barcelona, which prides itself on design and good taste. Not to mention the Barcelona that is incapable of enforcing the law that prevents a bar or restaurant from running an electrical cable from the facade to the awnings of the terraces, when the safety regulations prohibit overhead electrical cables, as they pose a clear risk of electrocution, detachment, or fire.

With animus refrescandi, while reading ARA online, I stopped at the advertisement for an air-conditioner-that-isn't-quite-an-air-conditioner called Epi-cooler. Since they don't sell it in fan shops (which are having a great summer and July) but only sell it online, they tell you all sorts of things that make it irresistible if you're one of those people who still want to go to the shop. It has "a wall bracket included with plugs and screws" and a standard plug (down with droughts) of the brand or perhaps the Schuko model (1.8 m). And I was just about to order it without specifically asking for divine intervention, when I read that it also has a "Manual in Spanish (also understandable for people over 70)".

One of the words economists use most is “it depends.” Perhaps we like to sound interesting or to split hairs, but mostly it’s because reality is complex and the questions we ask are difficult to answer with a simple yes or no. This is what I believe is happening with the question in the title: it depends on how we look at it.

Among the reasons for President Donald Trump to offer a memorandum of understanding to the Shiite Totalitarian Theocracy of Iran (STTI) were: saving the Soccer World Cup in the United States (he did not want to disturb this great business with the sound of missiles), lowering fuel prices before the November mid-term elections, and finding a dignified way out of the quagmireof the Persian Gulf after failing to overthrow the regime as an electoral asset.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo has decided that if the democratic game doesn't favor him enough, the rules must be changed. If he doesn't win, the problem is the system, not him. And some of the citizens who have the right to vote recognized. He fiddlesby crossing the dangerous red line of instilling distrust and suspicion in the guarantees of the process itself. If the difficulties many residents abroad face in getting their vote from where they live are well known, now the leader of the Popular Party intends to put obstacles in the way of a specific type of Spaniards living outside state territory: the grandchildren and descendants of exiles and emigrants who were forced to leave the country, let's say, due to force majeure. Feijóo hasn't even ruffled his hair questioning the validity of a law that aims to repair in the present the consequences of the fierce repression of the war and the dictatorship. Both he and part of the PP and, of course, Vox, seem to want to continue humiliating the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship ninety years after the "alzamiento" (which was not national at all, "national" was the Republic). As if the executions, prison, and exile of all those who committed no greater crime than defending themselves from fascism were not enough, as if the violence of the past were not enough, now it seems they want to continue perpetuating it in the present. If Franco wanted to exterminate all the elements he considered impure and subversive, and turned Spaniards who were not as he believed they should be into enemies, now the aim is to eliminate the vestiges, memories, and narrative of those who come directly from the horror and are the fruit of the barbarism that began that July of '36. Later they will say that it is the left that digs up the Civil War dead and they will complain about being considered heirs of the dictatorship, but when they attack the losers they show whose sons and grandsons they are. 

That the Supreme Court now allows itself to question the regularization of immigrants carried out by the current government of Spain (the deadline to apply for it ended this Tuesday) tells us several things. The main one, that the high court, with a majority of magistrates from the PP and Vox, is not only well decided to continue the fight for the salvation of Spain through the persecution of left-wing corrupt individuals, or suspects, or those pointed out (“they must have done something”), but has also decided to challenge the policies of a democratically elected government. This is nothing new, but rather —we said yesterday— we have known this at least since the Constitutional Court's ruling against the Statute of Catalonia. Now, however, with Catalan independence movement undone, scattered and poisoned with discourses of hatred and supremacism/racism (defeated, therefore), they no longer need to deal with what the magistrates would call “territorial issues”. Instead, they now prefer to intervene in immigration policy: at every moment, their debate.The Supreme Court's “doubts” regarding the immigrant regularization process are raised by the requests submitted by two autonomous communities, Aragon and the Valencian Community, governed by the PP and Vox, or by the PP with the support of Vox. These are communities with rulers who maintain — they also say this in the Balearic Islands, for example — that the regularization of immigrants will cause employment and housing problems for Spaniards. It seems that mass tourism and uncontrolled speculation do not cause these kinds of problems; on the other hand, giving legal recognition to people who already live here — subjected to labor exploitation and immersed in the underground economy — does cause problems. Or perhaps it is that these parties have also realized that anti-immigration, hate, and racism/supremacism discourses indeed have a great following nowadays and they stubbornly embrace them. And with the legal certainty of the Supreme Court, which gladly accompanies them on this journey.To do so, the Supreme Court looks, and this is new, towards Europe. Traditionally, Spanish justice distrusts and speaks ill of European courts, and has blamed, insulted, and ridiculed them every time they have ruled in favor of separatists or exiled rappers. Now, however, they seek complicity and shelter under the protection of the EU's Migration and Asylum Pact, which came into force on June 12 and is one of the most shameful documents the Union has produced in its entire history. It can be attempted to justify with whatever subterfuges one wishes, but it is the EU giving itself the green light to create detention camps where immigrants will be abandoned to an uncertain and often fatal fate; yes: in non-EU countries, so that it is not seen so much. The Supreme Court uses this to deepen the drift of the Spanish state, according to which the courts take the reins of government as and when they see fit. The Migration and Asylum Pact (the name is already a sarcasm) is, for its part, a giant step for the EU towards its self-destruction.

The American comedian and journalist Bill Maher managed to get the Vice President of the United States, J.D. Vance, on his show. I say he managed to get him on because Maher hosts and presents a show where Donald Trump started as a laughable clown and is now the personification of the greatest national catastrophe, and he's no longer funny, only scary. In this situation, what did Maher ask Vance? Only one thing. Fair play on election day: “With Trump, for you there will only be two possible outcomes: either we win or they cheated. This shit has to end. And you or Marco [Rubio; one of the two will succeed Trump in the candidacy] will have to do it. Can you tell me that you will do it, that you will bring the whole country to common ground, at least on this, and that you will recognize the other's victory if you lose?”

The government of the Generalitat, presided over by Salvador Illa, is made up of sixteen departments, nine of which are occupied by women. A parity celebrated by those who advocate for equality in decision-making spaces. But in recent months, political and social criticism does not seem to be distributed equally. Parliamentary pressure has concentrated in a surprisingly asymmetric way on the female flank of the executive: reprimands for Sílvia Paneque and Núria Parlon, calls for the resignation of Esther Niubó and Olga Pané, and demands for the dismissal of Mònica Martínez from social entities, unions, and citizen platforms.

I am writing this article when the real magnitude of the two Venezuelan earthquakes is still unknown. For now, the number of fatalities does not align at all with that of the missing persons, which foreshadows a terrible outcome. Each generation usually experiences, near or far, some natural catastrophe that invites reflection, but those that mark us the most are perhaps those contemplated through the eyes of a child. Mine —I was born in 1964— witnessed on the ashen TV of late Francoism the Managua earthquake of 1972. I was eight years old and I remember harrowing images, because at that time there was little concern for hurting or not hurting the sensibilities of the public during children's hours. Somoza's ultra-corrupt dictatorship had built entire neighborhoods with precarious materials, and an earthquake of significant, but not extreme, magnitude —6.2 on the Richter scale— killed between 15,000 and 20,000 people (the real figure was never disclosed) and left about 300,000 homeless. Anastasio Somoza then became a living metaphor for the greed that leads to disaster. A parallel generational evocation related to that country: shortly after, the Nicaraguan singer Carlos Mejía Godoy triumphed in these parts ("Son tus perjúmenes, mujer...").Many generations before mine, in the year 1755, another earthquake, in this case of apocalyptic dimensions, devastated the city of Lisbon. Between 30,000 and 50,000 people lost their lives there. Here the metaphors went beyond the literary description of a tragic event. In the midst of the Age of Enlightenment, this had a great impact on the main European intellectuals, who opened important debates. The catastrophe became an intellectual earthquake as profound as the geological one. The destruction of the city and the death of so many people shook — and this is no sinister play on words — the enlightened confidence in the rational order of the world. In Candide, Voltaire reacted with unprecedented virulence, mocking Leibniz through the character of Pangloss. The catastrophe forced a rethinking of the relationship between God, nature, and history: is evil an accident, a test, or perhaps the realization that the world does not correspond to any moral purpose? The discussion was projected into literature, theology, and politics, anticipating the turn towards an increasingly skeptical sensibility. The Enlightenment ceased to be optimistic and even confident; Voltaire formulated it cruelly: in the face of evil, one should not seek metaphysical consolation, but human responsibility. The old metaphors about progress and the lights of reason underwent notable changes. In general, they darkened.

There are jokes that, besides being grotesque, are revealing. A recent example: Feijóo's claim that the party that wins the legislative elections should have a "bonus" reward in the form of receiving between 20 and 50 additional seats as a gift, which, if they had been voted for, would have been won by other parties. That is, to force an absolute majority by legal imperative, and thus save the winner from having to look for partners and make concessions.

I'm reading an interview “with a bite”, the kind from Trini Gilbert in the ARA, at the Flash-Flash trout farm, with Karin Leiz, designer and writer, widow of photographer Leopoldo Pomés, who was a co-founder of the restaurant. The mother of the beloved Poldo Pomés says: “I learned to cook by going to the market and listening to what people said”.

In their desperation to obtain the support that will allow them to oust Pedro Sánchez from Moncloa, the Popular Party is now playing their particular tites, tites with Junts. PP leaders are aware that their policy regarding Catalonia has consisted not only of frontal ultranationalism (enriched by the radioactive energy of Vox, a partner and, in fact, a split from the PP itself), but also of a Catalanophobic populism that is profoundly divisive and, often, directly civil-war-like. Aware that these are not very good credentials to ask for Junts' votes, they have decided to resort to selective amnesia. The mantra is to look to the future and not "to the past", a remote place that, in the PP, they place between 2017 and 2018. This is what the "bad" and "good" spokespersons have said and repeated these days — the slimy Miguel Tellado and the wolf in sheep's clothing Borja Sémper — and also the curious anti-leader Núñez Feijóo, completely engrossed in his role as a man who can't find his glasses. piolins, the savage beatings by the police mob on October 1st, the más dura será la caída” from prosecutor Maza, the approval of Article 155 and the dismantling of Catalan self-government institutions one morning in the Senate, the farcical trial against the leaders of the Procés, with Rajoy and several ministers and high-ranking officials — as well as dozens of police officers — giving false testimony, the police and judicial persecution against Catalan independentists; all of this was, according to Sémper, "the useful and reasonable position that a state party must have".It is opportune, in any case, that the PP proposes this exercise of interested amnesia precisely when the Statute was approved twenty years ago. What times! This must be prehistory already, but the old people in the area still remember the PP's petition tables all over Spain asking for "a little signature against the Catalans”, the accusations —even then— of coup and terrorism, some not very veiled calls for military intervention, an avalanche of insults and of fakes xenophobic and supremacist against "Catalans" from media outlets controlled by the Spanish right and, needless to say, the lawsuit to the Constitutional Court that was resolved with the ruling that laminated a Statute voted by citizens and endorsed by the Parliament of Catalonia and the Spanish Courts, in a true —this one— judicial coup d'état that continues to this day with all the noise and fury we know well.In summary, the PP's hate speech against Catalonia and everything related to it has somewhat old roots and is a bit difficult to hide just because they are now willing to literally do anything for Junts' votes. On the Catalan side, it is urgent to get rid of the bullshit (whether Josep Pla or whoever said it) according to which there is nothing more similar to a right-wing Spaniard than a left-wing Spaniard. It's a joke to blow off steam at a supper, but above all it's a boomerang that always returns and makes a deeper and deeper cut.