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/Galiza

Renting in Spain. What you need to know.

Lenox Napier writes here on football, of which he isn’t, by his own admission, a great fan. .

The north western regions of Spain – Asturias, Castilla y León and Galicia – aren’t by any means the richest in Spain. And, yet, they’re the only ones which haven’t had their main highways freed of tolls in 75 years. Not before time, they’re making a concerted effort to force Madrid to eliminate this injustice. The explanation for which I am ignorant of.

Here in the lower Galicia, we have 15 wild horse round-ups – rapas das bestas – between May and end August. It’s reported that these are now at risk because of the depredations of wolves. Once extinct in Spain, these were re-introduced into Cantabria and Asturias some years ago and have since moved southwards to our forested mountains. It seems that wild boars finish off any carcasses left by the canines. Also an increasing nuisance. Not enough hunters, apparently. Perhaps it’s not for the younger generation.

A sobering statistic – only 5% of young Galicians under 35 have a mortgage. And many – most? – of them can’t afford to rent.

The Middle East War

The latest update from Naked Capitalism. Trump again whiplashes. Oil traders [finally] got it right yesterday by not reacting to his latest threat to bomb Iran into submission. 

The World Cup

How much damage can Trump do to it?

Some fans at the globe’s biggest party will have paid previously unheard-of amounts for what may turn out to be dead rubber games, while forking out roughly the normal ticket price just for the commuter train to get to the stadium. Witness the New Jersey Transit train ticket – normally $12.90 return, but $100 for the tournament. The fans are being squeezed like never before because this is a very different tournament economic model to what has gone before. For a start, it is largely taking place in borrowed American football stadiums, with the US oval ball sport leaving its mark, perhaps indelibly.

Hotels in the 16 host cities in the US, Canada and Mexico raised their prices by an average of 300%. BUT: In all of the 11 US cities. bookings haven’t taken off and owners are now describing the World Cup as a ‘non-event’. Karma?, as they say

Spain’s first match is against Cabo Verde, an archipelago of islands with a population one hundredth that of Spain. If they score a goal, it’ll surely be an own goal by one of the Spanish team. Perhaps out of sympathy for an ex Portuguese colony.

The United States of Trump America,

Quotes

• No, I’m not worried about inflation. I love inflation.
• Iran is telling me how amazed they are at how well they’re doing in the papers.
• I have suspended the bombing of Iran because discussions and final points, in both concept and great detail, have been brought to the attention of the highest leadership of Iran and approved by them. [While pigs were flying over Tehran, presumably]
• I would have ended the Vietnam war in 3 months.
• Grifting has gone global: [The plan of Kushner and his wife to destroy an island in Albania.]

The latest Epstein scapegoat is revealed. Podcast Video

J’accuse. And I refuse . . . The Drummer writes here on behalf of most of us . . Text at the end of this post.

The Way of the World

The FIFA president lobbied for Trump to get a Nobel Peace Prize and, when this failed, immediately invented the FIFA peace prize. [Narcissist meets narcissist, as someone put it.]

Spanish

• Chivo expiatorio: Scapegoat
• Cabeza de turco: Scapegoat
• Potro: Foal.

Did you know?

In 1904, a canceled event led to the St. Louis Bullfight riot: angry crowds, no refunds, arson, weak bulls, and one of history’s strangest event-planning disasters.

You Have to Laugh

Finally . . .

Yesterday’s post was late because I did what I knew I shouldn’t do – left the draft, intending to come back to it with fresh eyes to check for typos, before going out to dinner with friends. You know the rest.

Finally . . . Finally . . .

Michael Jochum

As I sit nursing my morning coffee, I keep coming back to Epstein, Epstein, Epstein. Not because I enjoy staring into the sewer, not because I want to live inside the grotesque carnival of corruption, not because I have some appetite for political scandal as entertainment, but because this particular sewer contains victims, children, young girls, human beings whose innocence was stolen by a consortium of predators, billionaires, social climbers, political operators, fixers, enablers, and powerful men who appear to have believed that wealth was not merely protection, but permission. Permission to exploit. Permission to abuse. Permission to disappear consequences. Permission to turn other people’s children into disposable objects inside their private kingdoms of rot.

And now we are supposed to move on? We are supposed to let this slide quietly by the wayside because the distraction machine has been turned up to eleven? We are supposed to forget because Trump would prefer we forget? Absolutely fucking not. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.

The Epstein files have not gone anywhere. The victims have not gone anywhere. The unanswered questions have not gone anywhere. No amount of Big Beautiful Ballroom Bone Spur Bunker bullshit, no amount of gold-plated redecoration of sacred Washington spaces, no reflecting pool cosplay, no fake war, no not-a-war in Iran, no Caribbean bombing distraction, no manufactured chaos, no frantic Truth Social diarrhea storm can erase the central obscenity here: Jeffrey Epstein did not operate in a vacuum, and powerful men circled that island, those planes, those parties, those rooms, and those girls for years. Donald Trump’s name is in that universe, and if we are supposed to believe that means nothing, then I have a war in Iran to sell you.

The insult is not just the alleged crimes themselves, though those are monstrous enough. The insult is the cover-up choreography. The Situation Room meetings. The panic. The binders. The memos. The sudden claims that there was no client list after years of MAGA influencers promising the mother lode. The same people who built political careers screaming about hidden elites suddenly discovering the virtue of caution the moment the trail started wandering too close to their golden calf. The whole thing reeks. It reeks of institutional cowardice, legal gamesmanship, public-relations triage, and the same old American disease: one justice system for the powerful and another for everyone else.

And spare me the sanctimonious lectures about “moving on.” Children were trafficked. Victims were silenced. Records were hidden, delayed, curated, redacted, massaged, and weaponized. The public was treated like a herd of idiots expected to chase whatever shiny object Trump threw into the air next. War. Ballrooms. Bunkers. Flags. Executive orders. Enemies lists. Immigrants. Iran. Anything but Epstein. Anything but the girls. Anything but the names. Anything but the photographs, the flight logs, the social connections, the contradictions, the birthday notes, the old quotes, the bragging, the pageant dressing rooms, and the sickening pattern that has been sitting in plain sight for decades.

This is bigger than gossip. This is bigger than tabloid filth. This is bigger than partisan blood sport. This is about whether America still has the moral capacity to look at abused children and say their lives matter more than the reputations of powerful men. Because that is the test. Not whether Trump can bluster through another scandal. Not whether his followers can scream “witch hunt” loud enough to rupture a blood vessel. Not whether some lawyer can bury a document under procedural fog. The test is whether this country can still tell the difference between justice and damage control. And right now, the answer is not encouraging.

Trump’s defenders want exhaustion to do the work that truth will not. They want the public so battered by scandal, so numb from the daily sewage geyser, so overwhelmed by the noise that we lose the ability to care. That has always been the Trump method: flood the zone with moral garbage until people stop sorting through it. But Epstein is different. Epstein remains the thing they cannot quite smother. Epstein is the corpse under the floorboards of the American elite. Epstein is the name that keeps coming back because the rot was too deep, the network too wide, the victims too real, and the questions too obvious.

Who knew? Who participated? Who looked away? Who protected whom? Who lied? Who benefited? Who made sure the files moved slowly, selectively, conveniently? And why, every time the trail bends toward Trump, are we suddenly told that the real scandal is asking questions?

No. The scandal is not the asking. The scandal is the silence. The scandal is a Justice Department that appears allergic to full sunlight. The scandal is a media class that can spend weeks on horse-race nonsense but somehow goes delicate when the subject is powerful men and sexually exploited girls. The scandal is a political culture so diseased that half the country will excuse almost anything if the predator wears the right colored hat and says the right hateful slogans. The scandal is that victims are forced to scream into a hurricane while billionaires hire lawyers, presidents call it a hoax, and cowards in expensive suits discuss optics in secure rooms built for national emergencies.

That image alone should haunt this country: the White House Situation Room, a space associated with war, terrorism, national security, and life-or-death decisions, being used to manage the fallout from Jeffrey Epstein’s shadow over Donald Trump. That is where we are. That is the degradation. That is the moral crater. And still they want us to shrug. They want us to let it go by the wayside. They want Epstein buried under spectacle, war, propaganda, grievance, and Trump’s endless narcissistic fog machine.

I refuse. I refuse because the victims deserved better then, and they deserve better now. I refuse because child exploitation is not a partisan inconvenience. I refuse because no country can call itself civilized while powerful men skate past accountability on the strength of money, office, celebrity, and fear. I refuse because every buried document, every withheld interview, every redaction made for “reputational harm,” every delay disguised as process, every suddenly-forgotten promise of transparency is another insult to every girl who was used, discarded, threatened, ignored, or erased.

And I refuse because history is watching, even if Congress is cowardly, even if the courts are cautious, even if the press is timid, even if Trump’s cult has traded its last remaining scraps of morality for access to the throne. Epstein, Epstein, Epstein. Say it until they are sick of hearing it. Say it because they want silence. Say it because the victims were denied power, denied safety, denied childhood, denied justice. Say it because buried evidence has a way of resurfacing, and when it does, the stain will not belong to Epstein alone.

It will belong to every predator, every enabler, every lawyer, every politician, every media coward, every billionaire friend, every institutional custodian of silence, and every American who saw the smoke and insisted there was no fire.

This story is not over. It does not get washed away by war. It does not get polished out of history with gold trim and patriotic bunting. It does not disappear because Donald Trump says “nothing on me” while standing knee-deep in references, records, contradictions, and a lifetime of grotesque proximity to the worst people imaginable. The Epstein files remain a moral indictment, not only of the men who abused, but of the system that protected them.

And until every remaining question is answered, until every concealed document is exposed, until every victim is treated as more important than every powerful man’s reputation, I will not shut up. I will not look away. I will not be distracted.

Lest we forget? No. Lest we allow them to bury it.

Epstein. Epstein. Epstein.

xxxxx

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 . . .

I no longer post on Facebook. But I can be readon X at Thoughts from Galicia. And on Substack here

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 there.

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

The Usual Links . . .

USA 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 . . .

I can also be read on X at Thoughts from Galicia. And on Substack here. I no longer post on Facebook.

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 there.

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