december momentarias

 

Twas in the bleak mid winter.

I mean yesterday.

I was returning from church where I'd been praying for an aunt who has just died.

As I drove up the avenue to the old homestead, a robin flew from the hedge and landed directly in front of the car.

I wound down the window and called: "Howya Robin."

He showed no interest in moving.

I got out of the car with the engine still running.

The robin pecked about happily close to my feet, still directly in front of the car.

The behaviour was unusual enough to make me think.

I wondered could the bird be bringing a greeting by the grace of God from Aunty Eileen.

Something similar had happened a few years ago with the death of an Uncle.

As I drove down the same avenue, behind schedule and in a hurry, heading to church for the posthumous remembrance known in Ireland as a Month's Mind, a dove had landed directly in front of the car.

He was so close and disinclined to move that I was afraid I'd run over him. Like the robin, he'd stayed where he was until I got out of the vehicle, said a few words, and gently moved him on.

I thought the creature might have been from Uncle Bernard whose remembrance I had been going to.

I ended up being late for the prayer service because of the dove.

And now today's robin from Aunty Eileen.

I remember the psychologist Victor Frankl recounting in his book Man's Search For Meaning that on a freezing winter's day in the Concentration Camp where he'd been doing forced labour, a little bird had alighted near him and looked at him fixedly.

He'd instantly thought of his wife who unbeknownst to him, had just died in an adjoining Concentration Camp for women.

It is an opprobrious and dangerous thing to try and contact the dead through mediums but I do believe that God may permit a blessed greeting from a loved one via the birds or even sometimes in dreams.

These things call for care and discernment.

Uncle Bernard's wife Mary was startled to find a robin in her house the Christmas after the Uncle died.

The robin was perched beside a photo of Uncle Bernard and Aunty Mary.

Again the coincidence was enough to make me wonder.

Last word to the husband of a woman who a few years ago was thinking of setting up a restaurant cafe and cookery school in Kilcullen but was having doubts about the project.

She told me that while she dithered over what to do, a robin came to her windowsill and she felt that the robin had somehow been sent by her recently deceased father and that he was telling to her to take a chance on the new business.

Her husband was with us in the kitchen when she told me the story.

"What do you think Tom?" she asked him.

"Ah Siobhan," he said consolingly, "sure the hedge is full of fucken robins."

You can find her Kalbarri Cookery School just outside Kilcullen.

pardon me sir but there's a goatherd in my soup

 

The commentator Mark Steyn remarked this week for the umpteenth time that "we" (by which he meant the American army) "cannot even win against goatherds with fertilizer."

I'd quibble with this.

After the Nine Eleven attacks on America, the American army defeated Al  Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and gave the Afghans twenty years of the most free, most civilised, society they had ever known.

In a decade long search the American army also hunted down Muslim porn addict and Nine Eleven perp Osama Bin Laden in his bolt hole in Pakistan and sent him home to Allah.

In 2003 the American army liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein's murderocracy, taking about five minutes to accomplish that job.

During the liberation of Iraq, the American army captured Saddam Hussein (soon after executed by the newly liberated Iraqis) and in the ensuing mopping up operation, killed Saddam's two putative successors his sons Uday and Qusay.

Saddam Hussein's army was according to some, the fourth largest in the world. It did not at any level consist of goatherds with fertiliser. (No offence to any goatherds with fertiliser who may be reading this.)

The American army then gave Iraq some years of genuine freedom, as with Afghanistan, making it for a short time the most free most civilised country its people had ever known.

I would contend that the American army's only defeat in these matters came when opportunistic politicians anxious to make a name for themselves on the homefront in the USA decided to betray our war time President George W Bush and the war effort itself, by claiming the wars were unnecessary and that the American commitment to a free Afghanistan and Iraq should end.

Barack Obama became a two term President of the United States, slandering President Bush and peddling withdrawal and appeasement regarding Afghanistan and Iraq.

President Obama's withdrawal of the American army from Iraq in 2011 constituted its only defeat there.

The American army could fight any other army on earth but they couldn't fight their own President.

The Iranians promptly hoovered up the abandoned Iraq.

We cannot blame the American army for that Mr Steyn.

To be quite clear, I am saying that it is objectively untrue of Mark Steyn to suggest the American army lost to goatherds with fertiliser in Iraq.

If they lost at all, they lost to Barack Obama.

There was more to come.

President Obama accompanied his Iraq surrender with the announcement of a timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan meaning the  Jihadis knew they just had to outwait the American army. Not defeat them. Outwait them. Hardly the military's fault Mr Steyn.

And as with the Iraqis, it is deceptive to classify the Taliban as goatherds.

They are a modern army, succoured, trained, provisioned and maintained over many decades in Pakistan by the Pakistani secret service (known as the ISI) and by the Pakistanis' accomplices in international Jihad. (Known as the Muslim Brotherhood but including input from several significant State actors.)

The emergence of Donald Trump in 2015 as a political figure with  his hostile takeover of the Republican party and his successful accession to the Presidency of the United States a year later, similarly involved Mr Trump claiming like Obama, that President Bush had led America unnecessarily to war and that the American commitment to Iraq and Afghanistan should end.

Mr Trump was elected for one term and set a timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan.

His successor President Joe Biden of the Democratic Party followed through on Trump's timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan, brought the American army home, and thereby handed Afghanistan back to the Taliban who had waited patiently over the border in Pakistan for their moment to strike.

Mr Trump has now won a second term as President and will succeed Joe Biden in January.

Any victory won by the Taliban was not through defeats inflicted on the American army by goatherds with fertiliser. I maintain that victory for the Taliban was gifted to them cumulatively by Presidents Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Barack Obama.

The American army therefore was defeated by three opportunistic and mediocre and ultimately utterly forgettable Presidents of the United States of America.

And, I hasten to add, by the corporate leftist appeasement oriented media groups of the Western World.

And, lest we forget, by Mark Steyn himself through his own willingness (like other former War On Terror cheerleaders Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity of Fox News) to turn Turk upon the American army and countenance Trump's venal opportunism in slandering President Bush and the war effort.

Twilight of the Sods

 

Standing on the riverbank near the Dominican Church in Newbridge.

It is a wintery dusk.

A little downstream from me, a woman sitting on the bank shoots me a delicious sidelong glance and rubs her pet thighs.

Like the character Mr Burns in the interminable Simpsons televisual cartoon, I will rue the day when such a piece of classic theatre is not worth at least an internal hubba hubba.

From behind me, like the knocking in Macbeth, a voice rings out.

"James, hey James, James Healy."

I am not best pleased at this interruption to my sensual superludities.

Turning I behold a slim, nondescript enough looking man, with a congenial middle aged visage.

He puts me in mind of a famous book title, to wit, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist.

He draws level, breathless, and speaks, proffering a hand: "It's years since I've seen you."

"Who are you?" quoth me a tad cautious.

"Donal Deeney," says he, "I was at school with you."

"Good heavens Donal," I exclaim, "you haven't seen me since June 1983 and you still recognise me,"

"You haven't changed all that much," sez he.

I scratch my bald patch dubiously.

There is an awkward silence.

"I wanted to ask you to join the Legion of Mary?" says he.

"Are you a Christian?" sez me.

"I am."

"But Donal, when did this happen?"

"I, er, I always believed."

Another awkward silence.

I was kind of hoping he was going to talk about some marvellous miracle or an encounter with the Lord.

Instead the conversation took a more prosaic turn.

"We were a talented generation," reminisces Donal Deeney in an apparent fit of sudden delirium.

"Who?" quoth me.

"Our generation at school," says he.

"I thought we were a mediocre shower of fuckers who never amounted to anything," says I. "And I'd be watching out for anything you might mistake for an achievement on a dark night."

"Well Tommy Ryan became a highly respected professor in Academe," sniffs the old alum.

"Gaaak," says I.

"You've got to admit that's something of an achievement," he adds. "And he's also now studying law."

"Tommy Ryan is at nothing studying law," snorts I.

"Why's that James?"

"Because the IRA don't need lawyers now that they've bought up all the Judges."

He digests this for a moment.

"David O'Connor is a top physicist," says he.

"Ah Donal what's a physicist? Someone who can learn off fifty thousand makey uppy words for imaginary particles. It's like learning to recite Lord Of The Rings. Impressive in a certain light but not really an achievement."

"James," says he, "David's daughter is also a scientist. And he tells me she's dealing with theories that even he can't understand."

"But don't you see Donal, if the scientists have divorced themselves from the basic requirement of coherency or comprehensibility, if David can't understand his daughter and vice versa, and nobody else can understand either of them, maybe none of their theories mean anything."

"Their theories created the modern world," pronounced he grandly.

I shook my bald pate.

"Not a bit of it," I said. "The modern world was created by Thomas Alva Edison observing cause and effect, using the methods pioneered over a thousand years by the Catholic Church in its university system. Edison simply observed that when you heat a copper wire it glows. That's it. That's where the great scientific achievements of modernity come from. That's where we got the harnassing of electricity to make light bulbs, phones, batteries, computers, everything. And Thomas Edison had never even heard of those superstitious fables we call Relativity and Quantum Theory. Nor had George Stephenson by the way whose cause and effect observations led to the internal combustion engine. Nor had the Wright Brothers who made the first aeroplane."

"But science predicts all those things," says my old acquaintance.

"The advocates of Quantum and Relativity cannot even comprehensibly state their theories to each other," I argue. " "I don't see how we can say they predict anything. I'll hazard that if they do predict anything it's only that reality will be what it will be. That's not rocket science. But it is Quantum and Relativity Theory. The salesmen for these superstitions, by which I mean theoretical scientists, are trying to reverse engineer their foobooneries into the great accomplishments of the modern world."

"But James haven't you seen the photos from the Hubble telescope? Do you not agree they're simply astonishing?"

"They are works of art Donal. They are not photographs. No chemical emulsion on a plate has reacted to light to create those images, Those images from the Hubble telescope are based on supposed electronic measurements beamed back to earth from space. The measurements are fed into a computer. And the software on the computer creates those images. The guy who designed the software, who programmed in "if the measurement is point five then print a purple splotch, if it's one point seven, print an irridescent yellow oval burst," that's the man who created those images. He's your Leonardo. Those works of creativity are paintings. They are not photos. And they're not even as good as some of the images of birthing universes made with spray cans and sold by vendors on Grafton Street."

There was another awkward silence.

Then Doctor Deeney brightened.

"Richard O'Sullivan is a success," he said. "You have to admit that."

The name jarred with me.

Richard O'Sullivan hadn't been the worst bully at Newbridge College but he had been the worst toady, cheering the others on.

I think he was the only kid I ever thought of trying to do violence to.

I tried to stifle any resentment or jealousy at the possible forthcoming revelation of his accomplishments.

Best not to add sins against charity to all my other sins.

"What did he achieve?" I enquired delicately.

"A personal fortune of forty four million Euro," proclaimed Doctor Deeney with a note of triumph.

"Ah Donal. Come on. You just told me you're a Christian. Why would you be impressed by forty four million?"

"Well you've got to admit... forty four million... it's not bad."

"Tell me what's he doing with it and I'll tell you if I'm impressed. Tell me he's helping little old ladies across the road or something. Tell me he's feeding the starving millions or something."

"He's not doing anything with it," says Doctor Deeney.

"Why not?"

"He's dead."

And I laughed and laughed and laughed.

I suppose I can't really complain to the Deity gentle readers, if Richard O'Sullivan made forty four million quid and then keeled over dead. I mean it's kind of a good one.

"Hoo baby," I said wiping my eyes, "that was worth waiting for."

But my companion was gone.

I could see him hurrying away into the gathering dusk.

Glancing back to the river bank I was presented with the scientifically incontestable fact that Sexy Miss Sex the Sexor had departed also, taking her magnificent silken clad thighs with her.

"Ah bawls," I exclaimed bitterly.

nonsense in discourse

 

Checking out a Fox News website last week, I come upon an article about unexplained mutilations of cattle which have been taking place in various parts of the United States over the past fifty years.

The Fox News team were speculating that the mutilations might have been carried out by extra terrestrial life forms from another planet.

Ah yes.

The aliens dunnit.

I don't think so.

The Fox speculation amounts to an insertion of nonsense into a story whose most probable explanation is devil worship activities,

Why would a professional news organisation prefer the alien angle?

Presumably because it makes for more pleasant reading.

Nonsense is regularly inserted into discourse for a variety of reasons.

Misplaced delicatesse is one of them.

With Fox I'm suggesting we're dealing with a form of frivolous incompetence and a desire to entertain at the expense of a more obvious and more troubling explanation.

Nor are other major media groups averse to such behaviour.

Ten years ago when a Malaysian passenger jet disappeared off the radar with the loss of all passengers and crew, no less an outlet than the august news broadcaster CNN, speculated that the plane might have gone through a black hole,

CNN was inserting this nonsense in the discourse because for ideological reasons and reasons relating to lack of integrity, CNN was unwilling to state the truth, ie that a Jihadi pilot and his accomplices deliberately murdered the 227 passengers on the passenger jet by crashing it into the ocean.

The misplaced delicatesse of CNN resulted in puerile nonsense about black holes being inserted into the discourse on a matter that was far too serious for such bumf.

Other motives for such insertions are more frankly malign.

During the supposed Covid 19 pandemic of 2021 and surrounding years, a so called Doctor Carrie Madej claimed to have discovered artificial life forms in the vaccines which she said had attempted to raise themselves up from the slide under her microscope.

When I saw Carrie Madej's claims I knew they represented yet another example of a deliberate insertion of nonsense into public discourse.

If there were artificial life forms in the vaccines, it would be very quickly demonstrable that they were there.

Such a thing was never demonstrated.

So Carrie Madej was engaging in a vexation.

But what was her motive?

There were several legitimate and correct reasons to repudiate the vaccines being forced by governments on the public during the Covid panic.

Firstly, the vaccines were made out of aborted babies. Secondly, the vaccines were untested. Thirdly, the vaccines were unlikely to work as we had never been able to control a respiratory virus outbreak through mass vaccinations before. Fourthly, there was no real pandemic.

In trying to explain Carrie Madej's wilful insertion of nonsense into  a discourse about the dangers and moral implications of Covid 19 vaccines, I would suggest she was running pass defence for pharmaceutical companies, governments and other promoters of the Covid panic, and that her nonsense was intended to discredit the legitimate critiques of the vaccines which I have just listed.

But of course she may simply have been a mischief maker, or a chaos merchant working for the resovietising Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, or a devil worshipper, or something else not on my map.

Whatever she was, my analysis is that she was not a genuine contributor to the public discussion about the vaccines she pretended to oppose.

Meanwhile in Ireland a well known journalist called Gemma O'Doherty has on at least one occasion attempted to insert nonsense into public discouurse.

As editor of The Irish Light newspaper she has in my view been substantially correct in her opposition to the Covid vaccines.

She has also (again in my opinion) made some worthy attempts to debunk the notion of climate change.

But as part of her climate change debunkings in her newspaper, she posited the nonsensical howler that governments had found ways to control the weather and were deliberately terrorising their own populaces with extreme weather events.

This was a clear attempt to insert nonsense into discourse and if we exclude the possibility that she has had a mental breakdown, we must consider the possibility that she did it to promote chaos.

Interestingly enough, Gemma O'Doherty has also used her newspaper to campaign for the release of cop killer Aaron Brady, a member of a faction in the drug dealing, people trafficking, child abusing, mafia concatenation of tinker gangs, styled the IRA.

But ah.

That's another story.

The Catholic Church as a world wide institution is yet another target for nonsense in discourse, usually placed by people posing as proto Catholics.

I suggest that in the Americas, internet commentator Taylor Marshall is the prime exemplar of this while a strong case can also be made against Michael Voris who sings from the same hymn sheet as Doctor Marshall, and was the driving force behind the ludicrously vituperative Church Militant website until last year when he resigned suddenly.

Taylor Marshall famously claimed to have had a mystical experience informing him that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church.

This seems to me to be a particularly manic misstatement of the Catholic Church's claim to pre eminence. Furthermore Doctor Marshall's habitual clenched teeth pronouncing of the word sodomite with peculiarly vehement loathing also seems to me to be distinctly un Catholic.

We may have reservations about sinful behaviour but we do not hate the sinner.

I still have hopes that John Henry Westen with his Lifesite News website is not merely yet another peddlar of divisive vexatious nonsense speculations as I have deemed Doctor Marshall and Mr Voris to be, but those hopes are growing less.

Mr Westen is much agitated by the Church Administration's attempted limitation of the use of Latin mass rituals. His advocacy on this matter looks a bit like arrant factioneering. I don't know for sure.

The other reservation I entertain re Mr Westen, Mr Marshall, and Mr Voris, is that each of them appears to have a more than passing fondness for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

That's a dealbreaker as far as I'm concerned.

Being concerned about World War Three is legitimate.

Justifying Putin's smash and grab on Ukraine is pure bastardy.

For the record vis a vis the ancient church, my own cards are on the table, as having stated that I consider the present holder of the office of Saint Peter to have attained his position through a coup d'etat.

Enough about the Catholic Church.

We can also find examples of nonsense being slipped into public discourse decades ago.

Back in the 1980s a former BBC television presenter called David Icke having declared himself to be God, also declared that Queen Elizabeth the Second of Great Britain was in fact a shape shifting lizard from another planet.

What is it with the aliens!

They get such a bad rap from nonsense mongers.

At least he never alleged that aff Queen was draining the blood out of cows at scattered locations around the United Kingdom.

We should be thankful for small mercies,

I suggest that Mr Icke had drawn his nonsense from the television series entitled "V," a silly 1980s American confection which involved very attractive aliens trying to take over the earth. The aliens were eventually revealed to be lizard type life forms in human body suits.

The deliberate insertion of disruptive nonsense into public discourse inspired by intellectually redundant television shows, seemed a relevant consideration to me this week too, fully four decades after Icke pioneered this form of bollocksology, when someone showed me a news item about former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson.

Mr Carlson is claiming that a demonic force left scratch marks on his body while he was sleeping.

He says some of his family dogs were on the bed at the time and his wife was sleeping next to him.

Ho hum.

Well at least he's not claiming it was aliens did it.

Mr Carlson noted that he had never heard of such a phenomenon before.

Objection m'Lud.

Are we to believe that Tucker Carlson never watched the vile horror movie which featured precisely that plot twist?

And are we to believe that Tucker Carlson never saw the more innocent comedy movie starring Eddie Murphy entitled The Golden Child which again features a similar dream based demonic assault with Eddie waking up to find scratch marks on his arms?

I think the former Fox News presenter doth protest too much.

More specifically I think it's unlikely that Tucker Carlson missed either of these movies from which he clearly drew his nonsense claims to have been assaulted by demons in his sleep.

I also think we may entirely exonerate his wife and the dogs and any aliens who may have been passing near his ranch at the time he inflicted the wounds on himself in order to boost his internet profile now that he no longer works for Fox News.

Thank you for your time.

kilcullen bolero

 

December light

Grey mist

Pavements glistening with a touch of frost

Shop windows glowing

Passers by scurrying in scarves and coats

Christmas close

But not yet

Poetry in the early onset of evening

Little birds with their feathers fluffed for warmth

Craggy doubters believing for once

Coffee brewed to a froth

Alison humming something about love

Heaven and earth are closer than they appear

All the promises of God are true

ghosts

 

The cafe is buzzing.

Amid the clamour I hear people at an adjoining table talking about a horse called Fast Or Slow.

My spider senses tingle as does my incipient gambling addiction.

I risk a sidelong glance.

A party of ladies disporting attractively in animated conversation, each with her own beauty, but all wearing the identikit livery of a stud farm.

You know what that means.

These bims know what they're talking about.

The horse will run tomorrow at Punchestown and he's going to win.

Steady Heelers.

You haven't gambled in years.

But I could win it all back.

Turn it all around with one mighty coup.

With trembling hand I raise a laden fork and munch a ruminatory mouthfull of omelette.

Outside a freezing mist drifts phantomlike across the Curragh plains.

the story of my argument with one antonio guterres

 (two Antonio Guterreses would have been excessive)

Antonio Guterres holds the title of Secretary General at the organisation styled the United Nations.

Following last year's attack on Israel from the Gaza city Statelet by the Iranian proxy army styled Hamas and Israel's robust pursuit of the Hamas terror army back to its bolt holes in the Gaza Strip, Mr Guterres remarked that the Hamas attack "did not take place in a vacuum."

By this I suggest he was morally equating the approximately 1200 Israelis tortured murdered in the Hamas attack and the approximately 250 Israelis kidnapped by Hamas, with their murderers and kidnappers.

I would consider Mr Guterres incorrect in this moral equivalency.

In October of this year Mr Guterres attended a summit hosted by the Russian government which was being held to promote a relatively new alliance between thug States Russia and China, along with aspirational, modernising Third World States Brazil and India.

It might be remarked that the governments of Brazil and India are seriously letting their countries down in consorting with Presidents Putin of Russia and Xi of China.

Without any apparent sense of irony, Mr Guterres consorted freely on Russian soil with surely the world's two foremost piratical mass murderers outside of the Caliphate, to wit Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

Bear in mind that Mr Guterres attended the summit and cooed sweet words to an audience of international thug pirates even as his host the resovietising dictator Vladimir Putin continued Russia's two year long invasion and daily and nightly bombings of Ukrainian towns and cities.

I find the behaviour of Mr Guterres in associating the UN with a Putin event, distasteful.

This week Mr Guterres has been speaking at an international conference on the subject of Climate Change.

Hint: There won't be many people at the conference who critique the notion that climate change is real.

It's for those complicit in the fiction.

But my reservations about Mr Guterres' attendance do not relate to the shenanigans of climate change.

I am displeased only because the conference was held in Azerbaijan and his attendance at any event in that country is as gross an impropriety as his glad handing of Putin and Xi in Russia a few weeks earlier or his equating last year of Israelis targeted by Iran to their persecutors.

For the government of Azerbaijan recently completed the invasion and annexation of Nagorno Karbakh a region it claims to own, and followed up its invasion with the forcible expulsion of the enclave's ancient inhabitants, more than a hundred thousand Armenians.

The Armenians call the land Artsakh.

I am calling on Antonio Guterres to consider his position.