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’

NB: If there’s a RV in brackets after a (paywalled) link, you might be able to read it via a Reader View extension to your browser, avoiding the paywall. If there is no RV, it will mean that the article is free to view or listen to. If there’s RV2, it means a second click on RV might let you see the article though the first RV click didn’t work.

Cosas de España/Galiza

The Property crisis: I guess it suits governments who’ve failed to ensure the construction of both public and private properties to have the populace blame the trio of greedy landlords, ‘vulture funds’ and foreigners for the growing crisis that’s now the number one preoccupation of Spaniards. And, therefore, to continue to tinker with these factors while not solving – or even addressing – the core problem of totally inadequate supply.

Politics: We’re in for a bout of ‘election fever’ says Lenox Napier here, writing 2 days ago.

As if I didn’t know, the Portuguese Camino passing through Pv city continues to boom. September saw a total of 38.1k Caminoers – a 20% increase on 2025. Of these, 28.5k(75%) were foreigners and 8.4k(25%) were Spanish. A lot were far less ‘poor’ than ‘pilgrims’ of15 years ago, when the annual total was a mere 5,000. This is because the highest percentage of foreigners – 12% – comprised US folk. These are particularly welcome to the hostelry trade, in view of their high tipping custom. About which residents are not universally happy.

The Middle East War

The latest update from Naked Capitalism. An ominous meeting at Camp David.

The United States of Trump America

Trump Baloney

• We’ve had the most productive 2 years in the history of the presidency.[Totally untrue]
• They’ve been the most consequential 2 years ever.[True but not as he meant it.]
• Going for the sympathy vote . . . I had a great life. I had a nice, simple life before this. I didn’t have to be here on a Saturday night going like this, working my ass off in front of you people! I could have been home. I could have been in Monte Carlo. I could have been wherever the hell I wanted to be! I didn’t need to be here. But I love you people, and I love it. I wouldn’t switch!
• Yet again . . . I’m a high-IQ person. Unlike some other people I can tell you about. I’m among the highest IQs anywhere in the world! [A scintilla of evidence would be nice.]

Others

• Even in ruby red Alabama, enthusiasm for Trump seems to be waning. At a rally on Friday he couldn’t fill half the seats in the arena. Even in one of the most Republican states in the country, his support is slipping. [He’s moving to smaller and smaller venues. Video evidence at min 5.11 here.
• He’s ‘cooked’: Trump’s staggeringly corrupt slopaganda’ ads binge is a sign the end is near. OK but the questions now are What form will a 2-year ‘end’ take?, and What can the Democrats do to mitigate the effects of it? [Meanwhile, see the article at the end of this post for Ms Harp’s role in the illegal ads binge.]

The 10 things that terrify Trump most. ‘No.1 is that Trump is afraid of being thought of as stupid, Because he IS stupid’.

Relevant Books

• Betrayal: Trump, Putin and the New Age of Conquest
• To be published in October. Can be pre-ordered now: Wtf America?!: The Way Out of This Hell and Back to Democracy. On Amazon or here. This is not simply a book about Trump. He is the vessel, not the disease – the product of a system decades in the making, fueled by powerful interests, weakened democratic institutions, and a media ecosystem that too often chose access and complicity over accountability. The book confronts the defining questions of our time: How did we get here? Why did so many institutions fail when they were needed most? And what must we do now to defend democracy before it is too late?
• The final pages of Kurt Andersen’s fascinating run through the USA’s history – Fantasyland: How America went haywire. A 500 year history.
• Profiles in Cowardice, by Jacob Weisberg. Cited in this podcast.

Did you know? . . . The original Gypsy/Roma language and its dialects

Romani/Romani is related to Sanskrit and belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family, like Hindi, Punjabi and Bengali. Romani-speaking ancestors of the modern Roma left northwestern India during the first millennium CE, moving through Persia, the Byzantine world and the Balkans before reaching western Europe.

In Spain standard Romani became Caló – a Romani-based vocabulary within Spanish grammar – also called Iberian Romani or Romanó. Centuries of legal repression and social pressure – especially bans and penalties on speaking Romani/Caló in public – caused most Roma to shift to Spanish. As a result, Caló survives today mainly in words, expressions and cultural memory rather than as a widely spoken everyday language.

Romani has been spoken in Britain for centuries, so it has adopted many English words and features. Different versions are spoken in England, Wales and Scotland. The English version (Angloromari) has English sentence structure but with important vocabulary words from Romani. It is often described as a mixed or Para-Romani variety, rather than a fully independent language like Hindi or standard Romani. It was sometimes spoken in the TV series The Peaky Blinders.

You Have to Laugh

One of the few Colins in the USA does Pete Hegseth

Finally . . .

Natalie Harp’s Role in Trump’s Propaganda Blitz Exposed

Trump’s ever-present aide Natalie Harp played a key role in helping the president turn taxpayer money into a vehicle for glorifying himself, a new report reveals. At a strategy meeting in the Oval Office, Trump instructed Harp to pull up footage of the kinds of flattering images of himself he wanted to see in the ads. Harp quickly obliged, showcasing clips of Trump before massive crowds and beneath fighter jets, among other footage.

The 13 partisan ads (so far) praise Trump for his military prowess in Iran and Venezuela, extol his much-criticized tariffs, and declare repeatedly in one ad that “God made Trump” because he needed the president’s help. Trump is using $20 million of taxpayer-provided Homeland Security funds to pay for the ads, even though he recently boasted that he has access to “close to $1 billion” in his political super PAC, MAGA Inc. (In reality, it’s reportedly closer to $415 million, according to official filings.) Instead, Trump directed the head of Office of Management and Budget to find government money. The video ads are all labeled “public service announcements.”

Trump unveiled his unprecedented blitz of self-glorification in a meeting with Republican strategists in the Oval Office in early August. Trump was supposed to be discussing how best to use the fundraised super PAC money to help struggling Republican candidates in the midterm elections. Instead, “he was much more interested in looking at videos of himself,” the Times reported, noting accounts from several unnamed sources on the scene. Trump said at the meeting that he planned to campaign for GOP candidates, but that his presidency needed to be promoted “front and center.”

Trump instructed Harp to show those assembled the “kind of images” of himself that he likes. Harp, the so-called “human printer” who churns out positive news articles about her boss for him to read, has happily gone digital, and she quickly called up recordings on her tablet for all to see.

The videos, created by the White House digital team, showed off Trump in “vast crowds,” and the president beneath fighter jets, among other images, the newspaper reported. One showed the UFC President calling Trump “the most resilient person that I’ve ever met.” A short time later, the nonprofit Securing American Greatness—at a cost of some $60,000—aired a spot featuring the quote. The ad ran largely in Washington during the first days of September, where the president could see it.

Trump’s self-promotional propaganda blitz has since gone nationwide and on major TV networks, including CBS, MS NOW, Fox News, ABC, and NBC. The first foreboding ad was a dark vision of a serious Trump amid lightning-fast images over the repeated message, “America will never be a communist country” beneath a song chillingly intoning over and over: “Love me.”

Democrats and Republicans have attacked the publicly funded partisan ads, saying that they “may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes.”

An unsigned press office statement said that the “public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders and abroad.”

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

The Usual Links

This – from veteran blogger Lenox Napier – is an excellent weekly newsletter (Business Over Tapas) on all matters Spanish. Indispensable for those who needs insights on how and why things happen here.

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. And this, on the annual costs of owning property here.