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

Politics, Property, Pamplona and Pontevedra . . .

• The PM’s wife is to stand trial for offences the national prosecutor says there’s no evidence of.
• Mark Stücklin reports here on buyer reaction to ever-rising prices.
• Spain’s rental crisis deepens as nearly 23,000 homes vanish from the market in a fresh blow for tenants. Mark won’t be surprised.
• There are one or two things you shouldn’t do when running with the bulls in Pamplona. This is one of them . .
• So, there can be a limit on noise levels in Spain. The Pv city mayor has been forced, by residents’ legal action, to do something about the cacophony from both the live screening of football matches and a 2-day concert which began alongside the river last night. There was also the risk of raucous screen-viewers causing the walkway above an underground carpark to collapse.

The UK

Possibly of wider relevance than just the UK . . . Why TV isn’t funny any more.

The World Cup

I was a supporter of VAR at the beginning but now see the logical conclusion of it as the elimination of referees and control of games by machines. See the end of this post for a piece by another sceptic.

Infantino’s Faustian bargain with Trump has stained football’s biggest stage. The Fifa president sought influence with the US leader. Instead, Fifa’s president has entangled football in politics and wounded the game’s credibility . . . While the World Cup will go down as a massive commercial success, no amount of revenue will ever erase the moral stain of blessing Trump’s wars in the name of soccer.

The United States of Trump America

Trump Quotes

• Affordability is a fake word invented by the Dumocrats.
• I am the protector of fair elections.
• Help me save America.

How can you parody this?

Other Quotes

• FIFA president Gianni Infantino: Thank-you, President Trump for the greatest human event mankind has ever witnessed. [The sycophants’ sycophant. Who was really congratulating himself, of course, while sucking up to Trump].
• Trump has declared war on elections in the name of protecting them.

Trump’s address was another contribution to the epidemic of Trump Projectile Diarrhea. It was what he perceives as a necessary step on the road to manipulating election results, so that he is never held accountable for the fact that his presidency has been a crime spree wrapped in a betrayal of trust inside a national disaster.

Trump, not Iran, is the world’s greatest danger. He’s a one-man weapon of mass destruction. As the bombing starts again, it’s clear the president has dragged the US into a limitless fiasco – and the world into an economic quagmire. . . . The pattern of presidential stupidity, impatience and irresponsibility is repeating again in Iran. . . . The Trump conundrum is ultimately one for the American people to resolve. They elected him. They saddled the world with this dangerous monster. It’s they who may ultimately pay the highest price for his depredations.

• If Trump in November takes the actions he’s obviously planning, will there be a violent revolt?
• If not, what?? Is anyone making contingency planning to prevent the death of US democracy?
• Where are the Kennedy assassins when you need them?

The Way of the World

Apocalyptic world views are moving from the fringes to the centre, it says here.

Spanish

• Pabellón auricular: Outer ear
• Lanzar: To launch
• Lanzarse a por: To make a bid for

English

High-T: The latest US fad – High testosterone. cf. Low-T?

Did you know?

The “Hammer of Witches” who helped fuel witch hunts, torture, and tens of thousands of executions.

You Have to Laugh

Finally . . .

VAR sucks the life out of football

This year’s World Cup has once more reminded us of the inherent drawbacks with VAR.

The debate over the use of the video assistant referee in football may strike outsiders as a niche, esoteric matter, but whether we defer to this technology is a matter of significance. It reminds us that there are two types of people in the world.

On the one hand we have the idealists and perfectionists. They believe it is always possible to make objective and definitive judgements about human behaviour, that we should and can eliminate error and attain pure truthfulness. On the other hand we have realists, those who accept that we must live in an imperfect world, and that idealism can have unintended negative outcomes.

Introduced by perfectionists, VAR only introduces more doubt, more uncertainty and less respect for authority. Now more fouls must be re-considered, more decisions made by the referee called into question. The flow of play is interrupted with more appeals to the camera and interminable deliberation. Football as a fluid spectator sport has been much diminished since its introduction.

Yet human relations only function if we proceed with the understanding that justice is imperfect, perspectival and contingent. We have accepted this principle in common law for centuries, where judgements are dependent on multiple witnesses and many perspectives. We accept verdicts ‘being beyond reasonable doubt’. We have double jeopardy because we know that we can’t go on indefinitely raking over previous decisions.

We acknowledge human subjectivity, in that some judges will be harsher and others more lenient. In football, we similarly know that some referees will be draconian, others indulgent.

Idealism can beget procrastination, inertia and paralysis. Or as Voltaire once counselled: The perfect is the enemy of the good.

[Or Pursuit of the perfect drives out the good].

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

The Usual Links .

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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 there.

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