Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts
the stars to flight.

And, lo, the hunter of the east has caught the sultan’s turret in a noose of light

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable – Christopher Howse: ‘A Pilgrim in Spain.

Cosas de España

Lenox Napier addresses the property-ladder issue here.

Cousas de Galiza

There was a local crash yesterday of a truck carrying 15 tons of Albariño grapes. Is the cartel so desperate to reduce the high volume of grapes this year that they’ve resorted to this? One gets a tad cynical in Spain . . .

Perhaps because of the good weather, this summer saw an increase in the average of 5 cocaine-bearing mini-submarines arriving along our coast every month. Most aren’t caught but the latest was and had 3 unhappy-looking Colombians in it.

I passed a tour group of c.35 folk on O Burgo bridge last evening and was pleased for the guide who’d only had 2 the night before. But then I noticed it wasn’t him. Luck of the draw?

This is the handsome façade of a house in Pv city’s old quarter that’s been for sale for at least 25 years. Which is hard to understand.

Perhaps there’s a paperwork problem. If not, I expect it’ll be tourist flats one day.

Portugal

The 6 best Douro river cruises, maybe.

The UK

Re yesterday’s joke . . . Just to clarify:-

• Scouse 1: A stew, believed to be Norwegian in origin. (Blind scouse: No meat).
• Scouse 2: The Liverpool dialect of English, reflecting Irish and Welsh influences.
• Scouser: Someone from Liverpool/Merseyside.

THE USA

Quote: Trump has long thrived on chaos and disorder. Where real crises don’t exist, he fabricates them – including imagined crime pandemics in Los Angeles, Washington DC and Chicago. Fake chaos fuels his power grab. Now he has been handed chaos on a silver platter. No wonder he couldn’t care less if the nation comes together.

A group called Occupy Democrats claims that:-

MAGA Attorney General Pam Bondi has been exposed in a massive scandal as her Justice Department is caught covertly deleting a study proving that right-wing violence poses a “far” greater threat than left-wing extremism. The study is from 2024 and was conducted by the National Institute of Justice, a research wing of the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs. It found that “militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States.” “In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism,” it read. “Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists. No single profile accurately captures the characteristics of the individuals who commit extremist and hate crimes.”

The study was visible on the Office of Justice Programs until Friday, when it was suddenly replaced with an error message stating that “The requested page could not be found.” Friday was also when the right-wing mania over the Charlie Kirk killing reached a fever pitch, with MAGA figures desperately trying to find a connection between his horrific murder and the “radical left.”

The data clearly proves that right-wingers are far more likely to resort to violence, and the deletion of this study is an effort to obscure that fact. Thankfully, the full study can still be accessed through an archived version of the page, but most people casually looking to read it will not realize that.

The study’s findings are in keeping with what the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, has published. According to them, 11% of politically motivated terror attacks in the United States since 1975 were motivated by right-wing beliefs. Only 2% were motivated by left-wing ideology. This scandal also reinforces the fact that America should have never trusted Trump and his minions with the colossal power of the federal government. They’re corrupting institutions designed to be non–partisan for personal political game and by the time that they’re swept out of office lasting damage will be done.

Other folk are echoing my insistence that Americans need to wake up and see the parallels with past events and processes:-

• If Americans want to save their near future, they may want to consult the European recent past.
• The political and cultural aftershocks of Kirk’s death will no doubt unfold in the coming weeks, but the biggest danger in a polarised climate is that the shooting becomes the Reichstag fire of our age. 

Quotes of the Day

Is it possible for a legal pleading to be psychotic? I think we have an answer. Lawyer George Conway – after reading the insane 80+ pages of Trump’s submission to the court in respect of his claim for $15bn damages from the New York Times. See here on this madness.

The Way of the World/Social Media

Go to minute 10 of this podcast for a bit on the ‘evil algorithms of the deep dark web’ and their role in ‘the politics of hate’. How to end this??

Spanish

• Corvina: Sea bass
• Estor: Blind, shade, roller blind
• Pelágico: Pelagic [Of, relating to, or living in open oceans or seas rather than waters adjacent to land or inland waters.]

Did you know?

The Chinese were mummifying their dead thousands of years before the Egyptians.

Finally . . .

How Epstein might have gained the wealth that no one knows the source of . . .

My thanks to those readers who take the trouble to Like my posts.

The Usual Links . . .

You can get my posts by email as soon as they’re published. With the added bonus that they’ll contain the typos I’ll discover later. I believe there’s a box for this at the bottom of each post. If you do this but don’t read the posts, I will delete your subscription. So perhaps don’t bother if you have other reasons for subscribing . . .

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For new readers: If you’ve landed here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try here. If you’re passing through Pontevedra on the Camino, you’ll find a guide to the city.

If you´re thinking of moving to Spain, this link should be useful to you.