A report from the Battlefront of a Covert War: Fentanyl Inc. by Ben Westhoff

I pride myself on being "aware" (that´s the old fashioned version of "woke"), but I know next to nothing about the world of drugs outside my meds. Nothing. Don´t even smoke. So this book came as a revelation. It addresses not only about the effects of drugs on health but molecular chemistry, international relations, organised crime, politics...

Since the British empire, perhaps even much, much earlier, drugs have been weaponised and used as a form of waging war, wielding influence and gaining economic dominance, at the expense of the most vulnerable segments of the target´s population. And, if anything, this book is a report from the battlefront of that covert war.

Having said that, comparing opium to Fentanyl is like comparing a blunderbuss to an AK 47. The insignificant amount required to take human life blew my mind.  It is ironic (or is it some form of twisted historic justice?) that the major provider of Fentanyl is the party on the losing side of the opium war. Oh for sure they banned the drug but based on a precise chemical formula, tweak the formula by a molecule and violà! No longer banned.

Fentanyl and the dark web were made for each other, one is the snake that can slither anywhere, even into the halls of the powerful, and the other is the vemon delivering the coup de grace...

I am writing this in lockdown. In these benighted days the world may believe we have bigger (or smaller) fish to fry but once the most immediate enemy is vanquished, we need to concentrate on demolishing or at least curtailing the more subtle beast, otherwise one catastrophe will inevitably piggy back on the saddle of another.

How do we do this? This book suggests knowledge, tolerance, co-operation and better universal medical systems. I already hear the scoffing of the ur fascists and the populists, well, let´s see they cope with Covid-19 first... The truth is we are all in this together and together we need to find a way out or at least a way to cope and co-exist.

Thank you NetGalley for giving me access to this most illuminating text.

Lois McMaster Bujold: Las novelas cortas de la historia de Penric. Fantasia sobresaliente.

De camino a su desposorio el joven noble Penric tiene un encontronazo, una anciana sacerdotisa del Dios Bastardo, el más excéntrico y díscolo dios de Los Cinco, muere en sus brazos de un infarto de miocardio. Al joven le deja un legado sorprendente, su demonio, y con “ella” las memorias, conocimientos y experiencias de doce mujeres (sin olvidarnos de la leona y la yegua …) con que había convivido anteriormente. Así el joven se embarca en una vida bien diferente de la que se esperaba al despertar esa mañana: novicio, sacerdote, curandero, mago y, ante todo, eterno estudioso de la vida, los conocimientos, los libros y las personas, y en particular, de las doce, muy diferentes, personas del sexo femenino con las que ahora se ve obligado a convivir en su cabeza y espíritu.

Con un guiño a la novela picaresca, y un fino sentido de humor, los avatares de Penric abarcan además la aventura y el romance.

Sitos en “El Mundo de los Cinco Dioses” las novelas cortas que narran las aventuras y desventuras de Penric son un alarde de la literatura de fantasía, un mundo donde los dioses y varios seres espirituales pueden intervenir en el día a día con una iconografía, cultura y política muy lograda y atmosférica.

Son también, una llamada a la tolerancia.

Morbid? Certainly: Their Little Secret by Mark Billingham

Many thanks to Net Galley for allowing me to review this text prior to general release.
This is the 16th Billingham novel starring his Detective Inspector Tom Thorne as the main character. Billingham is one of the school of British crime writers who began to flourish at the beginning of this new century which also includes another favourite author Mo Hyder, .worthy successors to the likes of Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. They all have in common their exploration of the sordid, grubby underbelly of British life, and their heroes are jobbing, fragile and challenged police officers with more than a few stresses and tensions of their own, 
I was lucky to read Billingham's first Tom Thorne novel "Sleepy Head", when it first came out, and "Their Little Secret" shares with that an imaginative and grotesque central conceit which acts as the main catalyst for the crime under investigation. This is written in typical Billingham style with the first person alternating between Thorne and the main antagonist, The plot is both convoluted and ingenious, starting out apparently as one thing and becoming another, the reader, like Thorne, is misled more than once. 
The characters are generally well portrayed though I cannot help but think that Thorne's entourage, including as it does two gay characters, is somewhat stereotypical and perhaps it was because of this or perhaps because I hadn't read the immediately preceding novels, I found the parts of the story that dealt with the different tensions between them to be the less engaging sections of the narrative.
If you like your crime imaginative and intriguing and are not put off by an exploration of human weakness, Billingham is certainly your guy.

The Book to End All Books on Female Health: The Vagina Bible by Dr. Jennifer Gunter

I wish I'd had this book to hand when I was younger. I recall desperately looking for advice on cystitis as a young newly wed. Well cystitis is covered here as are periods, fertility, the menopause, STDs, hygiene, waxing, anatomical descriptions, practical advice, all dealt with frankly and openly from a feminist viewpoint, this book has it all on the things you always wanted to know about being a woman but could never quite pluck up the courage to ask that rather brusque male GP. And yes, there is even counsel for our trans sisters and brothers.

If you're a woman, get this book. If you're a guy looking for a useful gift for the woman in your life, even your mum, you could hardly give them something more useful or detailed.

Stabbing and dashing: Galway Girl by Ken Bruen

If James Ellroy had a British disciple that person would be Ken Bruen. He's been around a long time has Ken, I recall reading a few his novels back in the mid 90s, one of my colleagues really loved him. I used to really love James Ellroy, but have to say I got stuck one third of the way through one of Ellroy's most recent novels, Perfidia, finding it just too excessive and hard going. So it was a relief that I was able to finish Galway Girl. But it did require a ginormous suspension of disbelief and not a little patience with the paradoxically impatient stabby dashy style. 

Galway's quite a small place, isn't it? So how come so many people get stabbed to death there and how come the bishop's cousin and the bishop himself... OK, don't ask. Don't stop to ask. Don't think. Just grip the prose and go for the ride. And there you have it. An unbelievable plot, unbelievable characters, lots of unbelievable action... But written with some brio and in an extremely. Punchy. Sort. Of. Style.

I think I quite liked it...

Consejos de una Remainer a los que se oponen al procès

Consejos de una oponente del Brexit a los que os oponéis al procès... Tengo que empezar con una disculpa. Disculpádme por no escribir en Catalan, de momento lo estoy aprendiendo y no podría expresar todo lo que siento que tengo que expresar.

Los que apoyamos a Remain en el Reino Unido estabamos siempre a la zaga y, es mas, parece, hoy 18 octubre 2019, que estamos casi a punto de perder la guerra contra el Brexit. Se puede aprender mucho de un fracaso, las lecciones que se me occurren, son los siguientes:

1º. Actuad pronto. Actuad AHORA, porque de momento ellos tienen la iniciativa y llevan las de ganar.

2º. No os calléis. Nunca. No os ocultéis. Nunca. Si sale un indepe en la prensa, en el televisor en el medio que sea, procurad que alguien de vuestro lado salga también y hablando Catalán y cuanto más rango tenga, mejor.

3º. Nunca dejéis, por educación o reparo, que lleven ellos la voz cantante, porque si lo hacen, os aplastarán y encima ellos no tendrán ese reparo. Apareced en los mismos medios, discutid y disputad punto por punto sus mentiras. Preparaos bien y refutad las mentiras y exageraciones del otro lado. ¡Pero, ojo! La preparación NO SIRVE DE NADA si no se divulga en un medio poderoso como la tele o los medios sociales más pujantes.

4º. No dejéis nunca de presionar los políticos, del partido que sea, mejor, DE TODOS LOS PARTIDOS (menos, quizás que Vox, que esos os harán aparecer tal y como los indepes quieren que aparezcáis), de centro, izquierda y derecha. Ellos tienen sus partidos, vosotros también.

5º. Como todos los nacionalistas, harán trampas, mentirán, malversarán fondos, corromperán cargos públicos… No os sorprendáis cuando se descubra que esto esté ocurriendo. Porque ocurrirá así es como operan los nacionalistas. Sin escrúpulos. No contéis con la justicia o el gobierno, son demasiado lentos y puede que ya hayan sido infiltrados. Por supuesto no dejéis de denunciarlos, pero adoptar tácticas semejantes, al menos a corto plazo, puede ser una consideración.

6º. Sed coherentes y cohesivos. Es natural que haya disputas y divergencias, pero procurad socavarlos, al menos en público, montad mesas de coordinación para unificar mensajes, concentrad en lo que os une, no en lo que os divida, nunca les deis un resquicio por donde puedan colarse. Y tened en cuenta que hay muchas formas de protestar, que tu adoptes un camino no quiere decir que el que adopte otro es invalido, no. Sed solidarios y tolerantes con vosotros mismos.

7º. La financiación es fundamental pero no lo es todo, ni mucho menos. La visibilidad vale tanto o más; también, la movilización, las protestas y las huelgas. 

A mi modo de ver una de las cosas que más debilitó al movimiento Remain era que la major parte de sus seguidores parecían ser manifestantes de fin de semana, solo disponibles el sábado porque estaban trabajando. Hasta se aplazó una manifestación que se tenía convocada porque se descubrió que ese mismo día un centro hospitalario tenía un evento caritativo. Esto, injustamente quizás, da la impresión de desidia, de poca convicción, de pasividad. NO. Vuestra causa, es LA CAUSA. Nunca cedáis a otro. No, dinero no basta. Hay que dar la cara, estar en la calle, en los medios, en todas partes. Vociferantes y protestando.

8º. Nunca olvidéis, si perdeis, LO PERDÉIS TODO, LO PIERDEN TAMBIÉN TUS HIJOS Y POR MUCHO TIEMPO.

Buena suerte a todos, nos hará falta...

We need to talk about Catalan Nationalism: The Politics of Regression

On Monday 14 October 2019 the Spanish Supreme Court is set to deliver its sentence on the high-ranking Catalan politicians put on trial for holding an illegal referendum on Catalan independence on 1 October 2017.

The illegal referendum of 1 October 2017 and its aftermath[i]

There are many myths surrounding this referendum and I will attempt to dispel a few of them below. Firstly, let’s get this very clear, the referendum was illegal. It was in breach of both the Spanish constitution and the governing law of the Generalitat, the regional authority of Catalonia holding it.

An analogy might help here, it was as if I were to hold a referendum on my street in the UK becoming independent of the rest of the UK and consequently, exempting myself from having to pay any taxes to the UK government and obey parliamentary mandates or UK law. One afternoon, over a few drinks, I get together in my garden with a few friends and we all vote in favour of holding this referendum. A few weeks later we park a few urns in the street, suggest that our neighbours, but only those in favour, print off their own ballot papers at home and deposit them in said urns. Obviously, the result turns out to favour the independence of my street, and consequently I declare my street independent. This is of course setting to one side the fact that the referendum had no legal validity or effect and that the vast majority of those taking part in it, less than 50% of the people actually living on my street, were in favour of only one side.

Effectively this was what happened on 1 October 2017 in Catalonia. You don’t believe the bit about the ballots being printed at home? Well that actually was the case.

The Spanish state had to react quickly and late to what was going on. Mainly because the Catalan regional police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, showed themselves to both inept and partisan, favouring the nationalist government and dragging their feet when it came to stopping the illegal vote.[ii]

Given the urgency, Rajoy’s PP (Conservative) Government scuppered the Civil Guard and sent it in to complete the confiscation of the urns. Crowds resisted and there were several confrontations. But despite the Catalan nationalists milking this for all it was worth, there were no deaths and barely a handful of injuries.

One young woman claimed for example that her fingers had been broken, it turned out she had a single swollen finger. When it was all over four people had to be kept in hospital.[iii]

The Catalan Regional Government said it would assist private citizens to sue the state.[iv]

There are still some 28 cases ongoing in 26 regional courts, but not all involve violence, some involve the misuse of personal data and some are complaints made about local mayors who allowed urns to be placed in their neighbourhoods… 

Because you see, and this is an essential point, not all Catalans support independence, in fact more than half do not. Recently, this schism has even spread to the Mossos, with pro-Spain and pro-Catalan Independence officers having running arguments online.[v]

An endogamous political class

Further to the above, however, there is a very stark difference. The Catalan independence movement is almost completely inbred, it is dominated by a particular group of related people. Genealogy has become very popular hobby in recent years, and even at its most basic level that of the surname borne by people it can tell us a lot. This is particularly true of Catalonia and the nationalist movement.

The most common surnames to be found in Catalonia will sound familiar even to English ears, because they are also the most common Spanish names found in the rest of Spain and South America, names like López, García, Martínez, Pérez, Fernández, González and Sánchez.

All these names are of Castilian origin (the termination “ez” means son/daughter of, so that would be the child of Lope, of Martin, Pere or Pedro, Fernando, etc. etc.). It would be expected that such names would appear in equal frequency among those holding political positions in Catalonia. The fact is, they don’t.

Modern Catalan politics and especially the independence movement is governed by people with Catalan surnames, such as Vila, Serra, Solé, Vidal, Bosch, Pujol, Font and Puig (I had to declare an interest here, my own surname could be characterised as a Catalan surname rather than a Castilian one). It turns out that people with surnames borne by only 13% of the general population of Catalonia, hold 40% of the posts in the Catalan political administration[vi]. Something very similar happens with first names, where Catalan Christian names clearly predominate in the political class but not in the general population.

In other words, the cupola of Catalan nationalist politics is a segregated, exclusive world and access to it may depend more on who your family were, if your grandparents were born in Catalonia or outside of it, rather than on merit. The basic truth is that Catalan politicians are unrepresentative of the current general population of the Catalan provinces.

Finally, I should mention that of the 13 Catalan political leaders currently on trial for the illegal referendum: Carles Puigdemont, Oriol Junqueras, Joaquim Forn, Jordi Turull, Raül Romeva, Clara Ponsatí, Josep Rull, Toni Comín, Dolors Bassa, Carme Forcadell, Marta Rovira, Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart, only one, Jordi Sànchez, does not have a traditional Catalan surname.

The politics of Catalan nationalism

Given the above it would be unsurprising to discover that Catalan politics and the independence movement are in fact highly conservative.

Here is a poster from Convergència i Unió, one of the premier nationalist parties in Catalonia. Yes, you read it right, it says “Catalonia first”. It is from 1999, years before the orange groper rocked up to the Whitehouse. The man in the picture is Jordi Pujol, party leader and leader of the regional Catalan government, the Generalitat for 23 years, only a handful of politicians could claim as many years at the top.

Mr Pujol and his family have been indicted of concealing public money in private bank accounts in Andorra, Switzerland, Jersey, Cayman Islands and other tax havens in excess of €100 million during his time in power.[vii] It is noteworthy that significant parts of the Catalan nationalist elite circled the wagons around the Pujol family (his three sons are also involved) and have so far managed to protect them from the normal consequences that such charges usually bring.

A second Convergència i Unió poster, this time from  2013 lays bare one of the main driving forces behind the nationalist movement, “Subsidised Spain lives off productive Catalonia” is the slogan, in other words, the main objection of the Catalan nationalists to being part of Spain is that they see themselves as subsidising the rest of the country. It becomes obvious that despite appearances, what is really lurking behind the recently developed queasy smiley logo is money and vested monetary interests, not to say the exceptionalism of believing that only the Catalans work in Spain and only they produce income. 

It is abundantly clear, then, that the Catalan nationalists are not progressives. Another aspect here is to consider their relationship with the catholic church. Catalan nationalists love to describe the rest of Spain as backwards, repressive and fascistic still trapped in the era of the long-lasting dictator Francisco Franco, who died in 1975.

One of the main traits of the Franco dictatorship was the mutually beneficial relationship between it and the catholic church. The catholic church was then, like the catholic church in Ireland, an intolerant force of repression. Franco was a favoured son to the extent that when he visited any church in an official capacity, he was ushered in under a canopy.

While the Catalan nationalists proclaim to the four winds how socially advanced they are and how they aspire to create a “Catalan Republic” it seems their relationship with the catholic church in the 21^st century bears an uncomfortable resemblance to that of Franco.[viii]

Above you can see the current head of the Generalitat, the nationalist, Quim Torra i Pla  leading prayers for the so called “political prisoners” last Sunday (6 October 2019) during a mass in the monastery of Monserrat. The monastery which is a very large building was so full that people are sitting on the floor. Past head of the Generalitat, Jordi Pujol was also in attendance.

It should be highlighted that Monserrat is not just any monastery. The abbot recently admitted he was complicit in concealing multiple cases of child abuse.[ix] And yet the Catalan independents still think this is a great place to hold their little ceremony.

This did not happen years ago, it was in the media last month, September 2019, but the independence "rebels" considered it an appropriate venue. The predator was nicknamed "Andreu Manos Largas" "Andreu Longhands" he was a catholic scout troop leader based in Montserrat and a priest.

One of the victims, Miguel Ángel Hurtado, says that he believes that political representatives (yes, that would include those heading the Generalitat during the illegal independence referendum), were dragging their feet when it came to acting on child abuse.

In conclusion, when the Catalan nationalists start to rant about “backwards Spain” or “corrupt Spain” and compare themselves to Gandhi, Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela, please bear this in mind, they are not really progressives, they are not poor, they are not powerless, they are not untainted by corruption, they are not freedom fighters and they are certainly not human rights martyrs. They are a close tribal caste of opportunists, avaricious wolves in liberal sheep’s clothing, they are in it, like most nationalists, entirely for themselves… And the power, and the money, of course, it is always about the money.

---

[i] https://www.elconfidencial.com/espana/cataluna/2018-10-01/1octubre-cataluna-cronologia-referendum2017_1622549/

[ii] https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/01/10/inenglish/1515574330_704678.html

[iii] https://elpais.com/elpais/2017/10/04/inenglish/1507104937_874487.html

[iv] https://www.elperiodico.com/es/barcelona/20171002/barcelona-ayudara-a-heridos-por-el-1-0-a-denunciar-6326888

[v] https://sociedad.e-noticies.es/mossos-balcanizados-126424.html?rnd=787

[vi] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9K3QsORGY1ZblpJTTQ5WFpjNkk/view

https://www.vozpopuli.com/espana/Artur_Mas-Generalidad_de_Cataluna-Jordi_Pujol-Casta-Endogamia-Apellidos-xx-CiU-Gobierno-Cataluna-endogamia-casta-elites_0_758024197.html

[vii] http://thecorner.eu/news-europe/pujol-case-corruption-heart-establishment/39528/

https://elpais.com/economia/2019/09/26/actualidad/1569514685_760345.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordi_Pujol

[viii] https://www.lasexta.com/noticias/nacional/torra-asiste-a-una-plegaria-en-el-monasterio-de-montserrat-en-solidaridad-con-los-presos-independentistas_201910065d99e5630cf2b33c9d0c0dfa.html

[ix] https://cadenaser.com/programa/2019/09/06/la_ventana/1567787095_452066.html