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

Politics: If Spain’s centre-left coalition falls, the country could be left with an alliance of the mainstream conservative Partido Popular and the far-right party Vox. It would be the most right–wing Spanish government since Franco’s dictatorship. The lesson for progressives everywhere is clear: economic growth and ambitious reform will count for little unless working people feel the benefits in their daily lives.

Society:

• Alcohol abuse is now responsible for nearly one in 10 deaths among people aged 35 to 54 in Spain. A government-backed analysis also discovered that alcohol was linked to 3.3% of all deaths among people aged 15 and over in 2021, rising to 9.7% among those aged between 35 and 54. It comes amid growing alarm over binge drinking in Spain, with the health ministry reporting that episodes of intensive drinking have more than doubled over the past decade.
• The National Institute of Statistics’ 2025 Fertility Survey – the first since 2018 – found that 15.5% of women did not want to have children. This is 3 percentage points more than in the previous survey. So, Spain will increasingly need immigrants to maintain the working and tax-paying population. Fortunately, South America is a seemingly endless source of people who assimilate relatively into Spanish society. Of folk who are willing to do the jobs the declining number of young Spaniards don’t want to do. Provided they can find somewhere they can afford to live . . .
• The calling of a snap election means the loss of some bills. Sadly, these include the one on smoking on bar and restaurant terraces.

I read about adverse reaction to intensive ads on web pages. If there’s a page more irritating in this respect than that of the Diario de Pontevedra, I’d like to know of it. It’s for this reason that I’ve stopped linking to articles in it.

The Middle East War

The latest update from Naked Capitalism. Iran ups the ante.

The United States of Trump America

Recent Clown Talk:-

• I know more about everything than anyone in this room. I know more about everything than anyone in the world. [Well, you would with an IQ of 1775].
• I never talk about the looks of a person.
• I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton, Sleepy Joe Biden, and Barack Hussein Obama. But I thought it was inappropriate to do so because you have to treat the office of the presidency with respect. [Unless I hold it, he could have added].
• I don’t want thick blood going through my heart. [As opposed to thin bleach going into his lungs, we must assume.]

In this podcast Mary Trump makes some interesting observations about her uncle, including that he’s a nihilist. So, these comments – from Steve Schmidt, a former Republican, now a Democrat – ring worryingly true. And again raise the question What are the Democrats going to do to prevent all this happening?. The boldings are mine, by the way.

The election in 29 days is going to be a historic wipeout. That is my prediction. Donald Trump will be repudiated. MAGA will be crushed, and I believe it will never again function as a viable national political coalition. It will endure as a poisonous minority movement, committed to extremism and fascism, sustained by grievance, and organized around the worship of one man.

But electoral defeat will not make it harmless. Its shrinking reach may intensify its fanaticism. A movement that regards its leader as the embodiment of the nation cannot easily accept that the nation has rejected him. It must invent a betrayal. It must identify enemies. It must explain why the people are no longer entitled to decide.

Donald Trump is 80 years old. He has spent a lifetime treating refusal as an injury and accountability as persecution. I expect his response to a defeat to be madness: an escalating fury directed at reality itself.

He will deny the results. He will allege conspiracies. He will tell his followers that their country has been stolen because the country has voted against his movement. I expect his allies to translate that accusation into a coordinated effort to obstruct the verdict.

On September 30, 2020, I warned on MSNBC that Trump would ask his supporters “to act seditiously” and “to retain the loser of an American election in power:” I predicted the political violence that would culminate on January 6. I saw the progression: defeat recast as theft, propaganda mobilizing grievance, a leader demanding that his followers deny the sovereign will of the American people. The warning was explicit. The catastrophe followed. We have no excuse for failing to recognize the pattern now.

But a midterm defeat will leave him in the presidency. It will threaten his control of Congress, expose him to scrutiny, and place obstacles before his exercise of power. Those restraints are what he will fight to prevent.

The danger is the use of state power to maintain political power without consent: intimidation of officials, retaliation against opponents, pressure on institutions, and attempts to make lawful election results meaningless.

In my reading, the bargain Trump offers the country is destruction if his movement loses — and dictatorship if it prevails. His own flirtation with being a dictator, qualified as applying only on his first day, should have remained central to every examination of his intentions. Instead, the news cycle moved on.

This is the failure that runs through the American media’s coverage of Donald Trump. His words are reported, and then discarded. His threats become yesterday’s content. His promises vanish beneath the next performance. Each episode begins as though the last never happened. An endless reality show, with no accumulated record and no sustained accounting. The president is granted a fresh narrative every morning, while the public is deprived of the connections necessary to understand what is happening. The pattern is the story. Isolation conceals its significance.

Too much corporate journalism has become frightened of that significance. Fear of retaliation. Fear of losing access. Fear of corporate displeasure. Fear of being accused of bias for describing conduct that would have disqualified another American politician from respectable company. The result is a vocabulary of evasion. Threats become provocations. Cruelty becomes messaging. Authoritarian ambitions become an unconventional governing style. The discussion turns to whether a performance will help him politically, while the substance of the performance slips away.

This is how a public becomes accustomed to danger without ever being adequately informed about it.

The same evasion infects coverage of his public behavior. When he appears to doze, the question deserves examination. When he erupts in rage or loses the thread of an argument, the footage deserves scrutiny. A president’s capacity to discharge his responsibilities is a public concern.

Show the evidence. Examine it consistently. Stop disguising instability as tactical brilliance.

The press cannot hold one president to a standard of relentless scrutiny, and grant another immunity because his behavior has become exhausting.

Every generation of Americans that warned about the essential role of a free press in protecting liberty understood something we are watching unfold: citizens cannot defend their rights when the exercise of power is hidden from them.

I regard the retreat from that duty as cowardice and a corruption of journalism’s public purpose. Individual reporters continue to do courageous work. Their persistence makes the failures of the institutions above them more conspicuous, not less.

For years, omissions defined much of the negligence. The question never asked. The statement never revisited. The threat buried beneath campaign gossip. The contradiction allowed to stand because explaining it would interrupt the spectacle.

Now those omissions co-exist with a propaganda culture that glorifies the leader, portrays opponents as enemies of the nation, and treats dissent as treachery. When government power carries that message, I regard it as fascist propaganda. The language prepares its audience to accept punishment as patriotism.

A frightened press leaves the public exposed to this manipulation. The propagandists supply a coherent story of enemies and betrayal, while too much conventional coverage supplies disconnected episodes, stripped of memory.

Here is what I expect us to see.

On election night, the repudiation will be unmistakable. Within a day, a score of MAGA candidates will refuse to concede. Within a week, Trump’s lie will have found its footing. Results that seemed certain will be presented as uncertain, despite no evidence sufficient to overturn them.

Within two weeks, Trump will be on offense. The conversation will shift from the scale of his defeat to his demands. His accusations will dictate the questions. His allies will demand investigations, delays and exceptions. The country will be asked to prove, repeatedly, what its voters have already decided.

By December 1, I expect corporate media to be filled with stories asking whether the new Congress should be seated, or can be seated. The obstruction will supply the controversy. The controversy will supply the coverage. The coverage will confer legitimacy on the obstruction.

The liars will arrive on the Sunday shows. They will filibuster a fantasy into apparent reality, exploiting every interruption, every timid follow-up, and every invitation to return. Their purpose will be to exhaust the distinction between an allegation and evidence. Truth and falsehood will receive the same lighting, the same introductions, and the same respectful opportunity to make their case. Viewers will be invited to choose between them as though a certified vote count and an invented conspiracy were competing preferences.

By mid-December, I fear huge swaths of America will no longer know who won.

Then what?

That confusion will become the justification for extraordinary action. A manufactured crisis will be offered as grounds for withholding recognition, obstructing the new Congress and protecting presidential power from the restraints voters demanded.

This is the sequence I am warning about. The election produces a verdict. The lie attacks certainty. The media amplifies the dispute. The resulting confusion becomes an argument for denying the verdict its consequences.

The press must confront that sequence while it unfolds. Every allegation requires evidence. Every obstruction requires an explanation of who benefits. Every threat against an official requires scrutiny. Repetition cannot turn a falsehood into a fact, and a presidential demand cannot erase a lawful result.

Citizens must vote. Officials must count, certify and enforce the results. Institutions must withstand intimidation.

A victory that cannot take effect leaves the people dispossessed of their own decision.

The press must find its courage. The verdict must take effect.

Dangerous hours and days lie ahead.

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.

Spanish

• Diferido: Deferred, delayed, postponed.
• Corregidor: Mayer, chief magistrate, sheriff
• Visitador médico: Health visitor. Pharmaceutical rep.

Did you know?

Your brain has the ability to focus your hearing on a single conversation in a noisy room while tuning out background sounds. Or to immediately notice someone across the room saying your name, even if you’re not paying attention to them. This phenomenon is often called ‘the cocktail party effect’. Sadly, it declines with age. Natural changes in hearing and cognitive processing make it much harder to filter out background noise. In a quiet environment, faint isolated sounds will stand out clearly – allowing you to hear, say, a tap dripping in another room or a 5 euro note dropping from your back pocket onto the pavement. But, in a noisy bar, your ears are receiving hundreds of competing sound frequencies at once, making it much harder for your brain to filter out the background chatter and isolate a single human voice.

*As I’ve said, ‘noisy bar’ is a tautology in Spain. There’s no other kind.

Finally . . .

This came up in the Pilates class, as Saturday sees the start of the October moon:-

There is a well-known Spanish proverb linking rain to the first moon of October:-

• The October moon covers 7 moons; and if it rains, 9.

According to folk tradition, the weather during the days of October’s new moon sets the pattern for the following 7 moons (roughly 7 weeks). If it also rains during that period, the forecast extends to 9 moons (or even “9 months” in some versions – implying prolonged rainfall lasting until May or June).

This saying is similar in spirit to the English saying about rain on St. Swithin’s day – 15 July

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.