seeing

Coffee with Montgomery, an old pal.
"What do you think of Medjugorje?" I asked.
"How do you mean?" sez he.
"Could God really be permitting the blessed mother to appear there in order to call human beings back to him?" I elaborated.
"Listen James," said Montgomery. "God is right here. He's wherever we choose to open our hearts to him. You don't have to go to Medjugorje to find him or the blessed mother."
I thought for a moment.
"Okay," I said. "But you know. There are scenes of natural beauty all over the world. Beautiful mountains. Waterfalls. Deserts. Oceans. Whatever. He's put them there. And it can be particularly rewarding if you go to have a look at them. Like a geographical pilgrimage. Now there's natural beauty right here even in a dowdy Irish village or a boring midland field. There's extraordinary beauty right here right now in this cafe. Look at your one with the legs smiling at me. The gift of knowing beauty is given to us if we travel or if we stay put. By the generosity of God it's given. And I'm suggesting that God has made natural beauty accessible to us even if we're stuck in a hospital bedroom or confined to our own home or stuck in an office at the Leinster Leader. And yet he's also put these scenic wonders here and there on the earth, and there's nothing wrong with going to see them, and in fact there's often a particular reward for us in experiencing them directly if we do go and look for them. I mean if we get up and make the effort to travel to the Niagara Falls, or the Zambezi, or the heart of a forest, or up a mountain, or by the riverside just up the road, or wherever. You'll find glory written in nature. Even though the glory of nature is all right here. So I'm wondering, is it possible, that just as he has placed natural wonders all over the earth, and just as he sometimes gives us a particular reward in beholding them for real when we go to see them, well, is it possible he's placing spritual wonders around the world too, just as spectacular as the ones you see with your eyes. Could there be mystical versions of the natural wonders we contemplate so readily? Could the blessed mother be appearing in Medjugorje as a spiritual gift to the world? When she appears somewhere could the very fact of her former presence leave a lingering mystical beauty ready to be savoured by any visitor? Each person feeling it in their own way just as no two persons feel exactly the same emotion in contemplating the Niagara Falls. Could she really have already appeared in La Salette, Beauraing, Pontmain, Banneux, Syracusa, Champion Wisconsin, Lourdes, Knock, the Rue De Bac, Fatima, Haarlem in the Netherlands, or Akita in Japan? Is this just wishful thinking? Can such things be?"

watching the defectives

The great moralists of Independent Newspapers today called for heads to roll at Irelands national broadcaster RTE.
RTE had attempted to ruin, nay murder, a Catholic priest (and his family, and friends, and church) by promoting false claims that the priest had raped a little girl in Africa and fathered a daughter with her.
Yes bold readers.
I do indeed maintain that what RTE did amounts to the attempted murder of Father Kevin Reynolds.
There was a significant chance that the public broadcast to the nation of these utterly false claims might cause this aged priest to simply kill himself.
RTE knew this full well.
There have been many previous suicides of priests, and victims and supposed victims, following RTE broadcasts.
RTE did what it did in spite of the priest's willingness to take a paternity test.
The RTE journalist Aoife Kavanagh who was central to the team of RTE malefactors promoting the malicious falsehoods against Father Reynolds, is looking dapper and unworried by it all.
Aoife Kavanagh will be well aware that the head of Ireland's Journalists Trade Union, a certain Mr Seamus Dooley, has already warned against any attempts by one the official Boards of Enquiry into the debacle currently underway, to make her reveal her sources.
According to Seamus Dooley it is a crime against probity to attempt to compel a journalist to reveal her sources.
Yes Seamus.
Unless of course the source in question has been trying to ruin and/or murder a man and his church by falsely claiming that the man has raped a child and fathered a child with the child he raped.
In those circumstances Seamus it is absolutely incumbent on Aoife Kavanagh not only to reveal her source, but also to confirm beyond all reasonable doubt, that she actually had a source.
Cos you know what Seamus.
I don't think she had.
But Aoife's sitting pretty.
She knows the cavalry in the form of Seamus Dooley and others of his ilk will soon come to her aid.
There ain't nuthin goin on but the rent.
The RTE programme producer responsible for the attempted character assassination on Father Kevin Reynolds has effectively fled the country to take up a top job offer at CNN.
I'm not surprised.
Like I always say.
There are no consequences for these people.
RTE disseminated its malicious and false allegations about Father Reynolds on television and radio to an audience touching on a million people while refusing Father Reynolds the chance to take a paternity test in advance of its broadcast.
Additional reportage in the print media meant that RTE's attempt to destroy the priest, which I regard as part of its ongoing attempts to dechristianise Ireland over the past forty years, effectively reached the attention of every citizen in the Republic.
That's some bit of slander right there.
The murder of a reputation.
With the aforementioned possible pay off that they just might manage to murder him for real as well.
The priest was exonerated only because he was (a) fortunate enough to still be alive and vigorous enough to defend himself, and (b) because the left wing activist group styling itself the Association of Catholic Priests obtained a supervised third party blood test which apparently proved that Father Reynolds was innocent.
I'm not accustomed to praising the left wing activist group which styles itself the Association of Catholic Priests.
In this case the nation owes them a debt of gratitude.
As do I.
You see, the crimes perpetrated by RTE against Father Reynolds were financed by us all.
And because we're financing RTE, we too are implicated in their bigotries.
Let me explain.
The anti Catholic Bolshevicks of RTE are each remunerated annually to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars at public expense.
In Ireland we are compelled by law to finance through compulsory taxation the anti Catholic televsion channel RTE regardless of whether we watch it or approve of it or not.
We are also prevented by law from setting up television stations at our own expense to compete with it.
The wheel is rigged and it's the only game in town.
And so to Independents Newspapers.
Today, Independent Newspapers through one of its hagette journos a certain Alison O'Connor, attempted to salve some journalistic credibility for itself arising from the RTE debacle by issuing a few mild criticisms of its putative anti Catholic ally RTE.
The reason the two thousand million dollar indebted Independent Newspapers might want to salve credibility for itself in this instance is because Independent Newspapers has cheer-led the anti Catholic pogrom in Ireland of which RTE is only a part.
And the readership of Independent Newspapers' loss making titles has as a result sunk to nothing.
Oh they blame the internet.
Every pornographer in Western Europe is blaming the internet.
But this is a reality check.
While sneering at the Catholic Church for the past half century, Independent Newspapers and its allies have most assuredly all but sneered themselves out of existence.
They live now only on borrowings from corrupt collapsed idiot banks and corrupt collapsing idiot governments.
So Alison O'Connor of Independent Newspapers in righteous high dudgeon holier than thou mode, as though she wasn't herself an atheistic abortionist anti Catholic bigot, proclaims in the pages of the Irish Independent that... heads must roll at RTE.
I'll have to ask for a Judge's ruling on this one.
Hey Judge Liberal.
Got a minute.
Alison O'Connor thinks people should be fired from RTE over its malicious attempt to destroy Father Kevin Reynolds.
Yet Alison O'Connor works for the most vicious, vile, invidious and venal anti Catholic newspaper group in Europe.
More precisely she works for the newspaper group that recently facilitated Paedophile Ian O'Doherty in his casually invidious libelling of the entire Catholic Church.
Independent Newspapers disseminated nationwide Paedophile Ian O'Doherty's egregious, malicious, vicious, malign and utterly false assertions in a newspaper column claiming that the Catholic Church is itself a paedophile ring.
Clearly Independent Newspapers had decided in attaching the name paedophile to more than a billion Catholics, that we are all fair game in the Independent Newspapers pogrom against the ancient faith.
And since the word Paedophile may now be so casually attached to me and a billion other noble servitors of humanity, ie the Catholic Church, we must presume the law has absolutely ceased to function in protecting our good names.
Of course there are no consequences for the bigots who traffic in these lies.
No consequences for Paedophile Ian O'Doherty.
No consequences beyond collapsing newspaper sales.
No consequnces beyond the fact that since the law has ceased to function to protect a billion people from Paedophile Ian O'Doherty's most casual semi literate incitements to hatred, clearly there is no longer a prohibition on any of the rest of us casually attaching the term paedophile to a disgusting opprobrious drug using lout like Paedophile Ian O'Doherty.
But here's the rub.
Independent Newspapers fired no one after Paedophile Ian O'Doherty's outrage.
Independent Newspapers continued with its anti Catholic pogroms just as it had done before.
There were no consequences for Independent Newspapers staff or editors over the publication of Paedophile Ian O'Doherty's attempt at incitement to hatred.
So it goes.
Let me this way put it.
Independent Newspapers calling for heads to roll at RTE over RTE's anti Catholicism is like the master of whores calling the kettle an Albanian prostitute.
It.
Just.
Won't.
Wash.

the light of other days

the way she does what she does

We met in the afternoon. Amal had a book under arm.
Discreetly tucked just where I could see it.
It was called Understanding The State Of Israel.
That old gag.
So she knows.
And I know she knows.
And she knows I know she knows.

confucius he say

The mind needs an anchor lest it gallop with the wind into nothingness.

the monica leech laugh in

The propensity of corrupt gangster bankers to asset strip the nation by giving themselves invidious loans from their own publicly bailed out banks, all while paying themselves ten lifetimes wages just to supposedly show up at work for a year, rises exponentially in proportion to the number of attacks on the Catholic Church currently being contrived by our wholly unaccountable atheistic government, media and judiciary. I suppose we're lucky Fine Gael didn't cancel Christmas.

au pres de ma blonde

In a cafe with Amal.
Her name means hope.
She's Arab.
But with blonde hair.
Most intriguing.
I look at her.
We are having a relaxed conversation.
I decide to raise the stakes.
"So what is the official name for the French secret service?" I venture pleasantly.
She freezes.
It is a most extraordinary display.
Truly a kodak moment.
In half a second she's recovered.
"I should know," she says as if trying to remember a piece of general knowledge.
"You should," I smile.
"I think it's the DGOS," she manages.
"Ah, the old Departement Generale d'Operations Secretes," I affirm warmly.
"That's it," she agrees.
She plays with her hair for a moment.
I reckon from the silence that the conversational grenade is back in my court.
"So what do you and the other spies talk about when you're sitting around of an evening?" I lob nonchalently. "You know like. When you kick back, and relax, and go for coffee with Pierre from Assassinations and Jean Claude from Ciphers. Do you talk about work or about politics or about sports or about who you're currently monitoring?"
"We might," she says with a forced cheefulness. "What do you think we talk about?"
That old gag.
Standard operational procedure.
The girl is chatting to you but she's chatting to you by turning every question back towards you.
You think you're quizzing her but in reality you're telling her everything about yourself.
I'm telling you folks.
Truly I'm a neuro.
Hilarious no.
I'm watching her closely.
I've definitely hit the nail on the head.
But I don't really think she's working for the French.
She's too good.
Saying I thought she was with the French was my little attempt at a double bluff.
No.
She's not the Frogs.
And I know she's not the Qaeda.
Not with coloured hair she's not.
Besides the Qaeda don't let their class birds out, except on suicide missions.
And even on a suicide mission, they'd never send the class birds to me.
They'd be afraid I might have sex with them before they'd self detonate.
But what a way to go.
Well I'm just saying is all.
No.
The Qaeda doesn't do honey traps.
Unfortunately.
I never thought she was the Americans either because I can see the CIA coming a mile off and they've already paid their mutual respects and decided I was a nut job. (Hi Mary.)
As for the Russkis, from my previous experience of Russian agents, I can assure you that if she was a Russki, she would have already tried any number of classic Russian gambits.
Pulled a gun.
Or begged me to marry her.
Or slipped Polonium 90 in my coffee.
Or demanded I make mad passionate love to her right here in the cafe.
Or more probably all of the above.
They don't hang around them Russkis.
Russian sexies are on the clock.
Also they figure they owe it to themselves to live a little.
I'm serious.
Would I kid about a serious thing like Russian spies going to first base on the first day of an assassination mission? (First date surely - Ed note.)
They do, I tell you.
Anyhoo.
Not the French. Not the Qaeda. Not the Russians. Not the Yanks.
Who does that leave?
I looked at her ever more closely.
Her and her magnificent indomitable Arab pride.
Her glorious Arab name.
Her refined but definitely disguised beautiful Arab features.
My eyes narrowed.
I still had no intention of letting her know I knew she wasn't working for the French.
Or that I spoke better Arabic than she did.
My gaze never left her face.
Was it possible gentle readers.
After all these years.
Could she really be.
An Israeli.
Now that's what I call espionage.

james healy's grand summation of richard dawkins theory of everything

There is nothing in the universe that cannot be sneered at.

richard dawkins theory of everything

If Richard Dawkins can sneer every other perspective on reality out of existence, why then his own perspective on reality must have the resonance of ultimate truth.

confucius he say

Richard Dawkins finds in genes the cosmic destinies he has already hidden there.

whom the gods wish to destroy they first make sublimely knowledgeable about the political situation in the philippines

The noble Heelers is sitting in his attic garret.
His mood is pensive.
He is looking at a magazine advert for a forthcoming production of his play Poets In Paradise.
The play is to be produced in aid of local man Gerry O'Donoghue's African charity.
As scholars of my work will know, or at least suspect, the charitable Mr O'Donoghue was my school teacher in the third grade many moons ago.
Nowadays Mr O'Donoghue makes his crust by being Principle at another school.
Thirty five years ago I used to refer to him as Dunnywhacks, an ironic play on the fact that due to the influence of the 1960s hippy movement, and in spite of the most egregious provocations, he never hit anybody.
Boy did we test him.
Nowadays, in between educating Irish proles, he spends his Summers building houses in Africa.
Hence the new nickname I currently favour for him, O'Donoghue Of The River.
I picture him as a sort of Somerset Maugham personnage sailing up the Zambezi in a boat loaded with house building materials.
When the pastoral nomadic tribes of the plains see him coming they let out a mighty and clamorous roar.
"Oh no."
"It's him again."
"Quick."
"Everyone flee."
"Run for your lives."
"If he catches you, he'll build you a crap house and force you to live in it."
"We're nomads for crying out loud. Why can't he just leave us alone."
"Etc etc."
Particularly etc etc.
Ah me and Somerset Maugham.
What a pair of uncharitable b-st--ds.
Anyhoo.
Irish school teachers are so overpaid that they have plenty of free time and spare cash for such selfless endeavours.
I'm telling you.
They have done more to bankrupt Ireland than the gangster banks, corrupt judiciary and anit Catholic whoremaster parliamentarians put together.
I mean, I don't want to go casting no aspoyshuns.
Them and the nurses and the cops.
They're all to blame.
And the soldiers.
I kid you not.
Still O'Donoghue Of The River is well thought of in certain circles and it appears my inimitable Uncle Scutch has volunteered both my play and my acting services to raise funds for him without any prior consultation with me.
Uncle Scutch can do this because strictly speaking it's his play.
He rewrote one of my early efforts and transformed it into something that works.
Ho hum.
O'Donoghue Of The River.
We were never friends.
My mind races.
O'Donoghue Of The River is married to Julie Scrumptious.
The one who back in the dulcet Summer of 1988 famously accosted me on Kilcullen Main Street to dispute my various journalistic pronouncements in defence of the Marcos regime in the Philippines.
Again I kid you not.
As I recall she rebuked me for my unwillingness to support leftist people's democracy movements with the sublimely intellectual challenge: "I bet you're about thirty years old, and you never go anywhere, and you've got no friends."
Inspired.
It was like a gypsy curse.
I was only 22 at the time but it all came true.
For my part, I had responded to her rationo legalistic gambit with all the impassioned insight of a young Emanuel Kant.
My exact words were as follows: "You fish wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiife."
I didn't stop there of course.
You Fishwife was merely the beginning of a long peroration.
A stunning eulogy on man's inhumanity to fishwife.
I was always a bit sensitive about never going anywhere and having no friends.
Towards the end of my rant I noticed doors opening on the Logstown housing estate, and the good burghers of Kilcullen standing with whimsical expressions on their florid features, arms folded, drinking it all in.
Too good to miss evidently.
The townsfolk were always fascinated by the Philippines.
And fishwives.
Arf arf.
After Julie Scrumptious scuttled off up the street I turned to my French cousin Marie Celeste who was standing by examining the drains.
I was hoping that my newly perfected practice of screaming vituperative invective at a respectable married woman on a public street had not amounted to an undignified display of semi psychotic ridiculousness.
Welcome to my world.
Truly it is the land of wishful thinking.
And I am its king.
Sort of like the cartoon character Homer Simpson remembering his drunken roister of the night before as a civilised evening with him in a top hat, delighting all who passed with his wit and insight.
Still hopeful that my exchange with Fishwife might have passed for a sophisticated exercise in political dialogue, I asked Celeste: "Was that bad?"
And Celeste just lowered her head into her hands and murmured: "Oh Gems. Zat was Terry Bull."
Back to the present.
The circle is now complete, as Darth Vader used to say.
What it boils down to is this.
In early December I'll be performing as WB Yeats in my own play in order to raise money for O'Donoghue Of The River and his fishwife's Summer holidays in Africa.
The midi chlorians will have a field day.
And there's more.
The play will be performed in a traditional reconsecrated church belonging to none other than Ireland's richest boor (Newspaper baron surely - Ed note)  Mr Tony O'Reilly, located in the grounds of his Gormanghast pile at Castlemartin.
You can imagine how thrilled I was some years ago to learn that some tame Bishop had allowed the anti Catholic O'Reilly to have his own personal church consecrated as Catholic amidst the rolling splendour of his purloined estates.
I kid you not again.
But can you believe it.
Me performing in Bloody Reilly's parlour.
Oh lawsy me.
Hopefully he won't have taken to heart my accusations that his newspaper group is the most virulently anti Catholic vomitous bankrupt collection of talentless conformist shite hawks in Europe.
And hopefully he'll have missed my public letters to the priests and nuns of Ireland urging them to boycott his funeral which should be coming up shortly.
Bloody Reilly and Sergeant O'Donoghue's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
I say it again.
Can you ephin believe it.
My play being performed on behalf of the Gerry and Julie O'Brolchain in Bloody Reilly's pad.
I sit in my attic garret contemplating the polynomial vicissitudes of existence.
"Focque," I murmur.
The ghost of Rudyard Kipling appears at my shoulder and casts his eye on the play advert.
Rudyard Kipling smiles and nods and intones slowly:
"As a dog returns to his vomit
As the pig returns to the mire
The fool's wavering finger
Goes wandering back to the fire."