The Heelers Diaries

the fantasy world of ireland's greatest living poet

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Location: Kilcullen (Phone 087 7790766), County Kildare, Ireland

Saturday, April 08, 2017

syriana


Considerations Regarding The Decision By American President Donald Trump To Bomb An Airbase In Syria Last Night.

1. The Syrian civil war began six years ago in 2011. What seemed initially a somewhat legitimate uprising against the fifty year old Assad family dictatorship, was immediately hijacked by the Muslim  Brotherhood and its Al Qaeda franchise. and a little later by the Muslim Brotherhood's newer front operation a group styled Isis.

2. The Muslim Brotherhood/Al Qaeda/Isis side in the Syrian civil war is sponsored by Turkey's Islamist Muslim Brotherhood President Recip Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey is playing a grand power game in Syria. Isis was orginally equipped, trained and given territorial access to Turkey to enable it to evade Assad's forces on the battlefield in Syria.

3. The population of Syria when the civil war started was estimated at 22 million. An estimated half a million of them have been killed. Several million more have decamped to Europe.

4. Russia's resovietising and piratical President Vladimir Putin is supporting the Assad government in Syria. The Islamic Republic of Iran is also supporting the Assad government. Iran like Turkey is playing a grand power game but on the opposing side. The Russians have some legitimate interest in supporting their long term ally Assad. Russian President Putin is in my assessment a thoroughgoing villain. But like his communist predecessor Stalin, Putin is not always wrong. After years of continuous blood letting in Syria, I have come to the conclusion that in this instance the villainous Putin is less wrong than anybody else. We should let the Russian's finish the job now. It is too late to become concerned about the latest atrocities. We've had six years of those.

5. There are no heroes in the Syrian civil war.

6. Any Western intervention to end the Assad government in Syria will mean explicitly that we are intervening to support Al Qaeda.

7. It has been a long term strategic aim of Al Qaeda to suck America into the war using the pretext that the Assad government had launched chemical weapons attacks on civilians. It is my analysis that the Muslim Brotherhood. Al Qaeda and Isis have themselves used chemical weapons on several occasions in Syria and elsewhere.

8. In 2013, then American President Barack Obama came close to launching direct American intervention in Syria following a purported chemical weapons attack by Assad's forces. President Obama was prevented from doing so by a broad public outcry in America and Europe.

9. President Obama then increased exponentially his financing and equipping of the Muslim Brotherhood/Al Qaeda/Isis controlled rebel groups. I am suggesting that President Obama's policies of succouring the Islamist rebellion before and after 2013 meant that the Al Qaeda rebels could not be defeated militarily on the battlefield although they also still couldn't win. This is precisely why we've had a slow bleed in Syria.

10, It is contended that up to a hundred people died earlier this week in a chemical weapons attack on the Islamist held town of Khan Sheikhoun in Syria. These deaths are being touted by current American President Donald Trump as his justification for bombing Syria yesterday.

11. It has not been proven that the Assad government used chemical weapons on Khan Sheikhoun. The possibility remains that an Assad government air attack hit reserves of chemical weapons held by the Islamist occupiers of the town. There is also a not completely remote possibility that the Islamists staged a chemical weapons attack on their own town themselves.

12. In any case the deaths of a hundred people in Khan Sheikhoun do not outweigh the 500,000 killed during the last six years of Islamic Brotherhood/Al Qaeda/Isis terror in Syria. It is debatable whether any deaths on earth can equate to the tortures used by the Muslim Brotherhood/Al Qaeda/Isis and their allies. The Isis death ride from Syria into Iraq across the plains of Nineveh in 2014 brought mutilation, torture and slaughter to tens of thousands of men, women and children. It is unconscionable that we might now forget this and help Isis in its attempt to steal a victory in Syria. That's just what President Donald Trump has done.

13.  I would ask you to consider the minor possibility that President Donald Trump's reason for acting to bomb Syria yesterday, may be an attempt to distract attention from scandals slowly engulfing his Administration regarding purported Russian and Cosa Nostra manipulations of the American electoral process last November, and purported contacts between Mr Trump's staffers in the run up to the election and senior staffers in Mr Putin's Russian government. In this context Mr Trump's actions would be likenable to President Bill Clinton's wildcard bombings of Yugoslavia and Iraq in the late 1990's which I have suggested elsewhere were blatant attempts to distract attention from public concerns about his sexual liaison with Monica Lewinski. If Bill Clinton had not bombed Iraq and Yugoslavia, the Monica Lewinski scandal would have ended his Presidency. I do not enjoy speaking like this. I consider that Western freedoms have been vouchsafed to us for a hundred years by the sacrifices of American soldiers and by the courage and principles of the American people. The Clinton war gambits in the late 1990's, and Mr Trump's present actions, are the only occasions I have felt compelled to oppose American foreign policy. It is necessary to view any criticisms I make of the Trump Administration through the prism of my conviction that without the Americans we would all be Nazis. Or Commies.  Or Muslims. I do not want a new dark ages for humanity which is what the loss of the American alliance will mean for us. But I don't want the apocalypse either.

14. There is an additional related minor, but not insignificant, consideration necessary to mention here, to wit the speculative postulation that President Trump has bombed Syria with the private acceptance of President Putin in order to create the illusion of public distance between them. Bear in mind that there is a strong perception in America that Putin manipulated the American elections last November with the express purpose of installing Donald Trump as President of the USA. Mr Trump needs that perception to go away. In such a scenario, Putin is Monica. But I mention this speculation as a minor possibility. I do not think it explains the American attack on Syria and I do not wish to slander President Trump.

15. Regardless of why he went in, Mr Trump's intervention in Syria means America is now fighting on the side of Al Qaeda in the Syrian civil war.

16. I would counsel against fighting on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, Isis and the Turks in Syria or anywhere else. Let them fight their own battles in the charnel house they have made of Syria. More precisely I would advise against using the American airforce to bomb into power what is essentially a worldwide Jihad terror army.

17. There are no moderate rebel factions in Syria. The factions which President Obama had claimed in 2013 to be "pro Western" used the arms and materiel he sent them to run pass defence for Isis, forming a cordon sanitaire around the zones controlled by Isis so that the Assad regime could not reach them.

18. Mr Trump's actions in bombing a Syrian airbase, at the very least risk conflict with Putin's Russia.

19. Mr Trump's actions also risk a conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran, an Assad ally, which like Assad's enemies in the Muslim Brotherhood/Al Qaeda/Isis grouping, has the capacity to project Islamist terror worldwide.

20. Mr Trump's bombing of a Syrian airbase yesterday was an act of dangerously rash adventurism.

yes but



Lao Tzu: "A man who masters himself is worth ten thousand who take a city."

James Healy: "Yes but... I'd still prefer to have the ten thousand hysterical masturbators if you really did expect me to take the city, than just one guy who was really cool headed and detached."

Wednesday, April 05, 2017

hence wilt thou lift up a caffe latte

Quaffing coffees at the Cafe Nero with the ghost of Thomas Hardy.
"Your novels are too depressing," quoth me.
"How would you know, you've never read them," sez he.
"I dipped in," quoth me.
"You didn't really," sez he.
"Well I saw the film version of Tess of the d'Urbevilles," quoth me.
"Doesn't count," sez he.
I start forward suddenly in my seat.
"Look, look," I breathe, "it's Ridey Ride MacRide the Ride."
Sure enough the beautiful manageress has appeared behind the counter.
"Heelers, you're the last of the great romantics," sighs Thomas Hardy.
"I know," I reply.

meditation on the decision by rupert murdock and his son Lachlainn of fox news to pay gretchen carlson 20 million dollars after her contract had been cancelled and she decided to claim her former boss at fox roger ailes sexually harassed her


This is called paying the bimbo geld
And I'll tell you because you appear to be dimbos
Once you have paid them the bimbo geld
You'll never get rid of the bimbos.



(Copies to Andrea Tantaros, Wendy Walsh, and the dozen others who, since Gretchen Carlson's successful 20 million dollar extortion at Fox, have launched similar opportunistic lawsuits.)

Tuesday, April 04, 2017

considerations of christian claims about deity

If we look at the Christian claim about God, it seems to amount to this: God exists. There is one God; There are three persons in the one God; These three persons are the Father, the Son (Jesus) and the Holy Spirit.
On the face of it the Muslim teaching about God is simpler. The Muslim understanding as I understand it is: God exists. God is one; There is only one God: There are no divisions in God; God does not have a Son nor is there any need to conceive of the Holy Spirit as a distinct person of the godhead.
From a certain perspective I find the simplicity and directness of the Muslim assertion connotes a likelihood that it is close to the truth.
Similarly the Jewish understanding of God admits of oneness but not explicitly (or not for most Jews) of three persons in the one God.
Both Christian and Muslim understandings have in some way (I think a mystical way) come from Judaism. My assessment of this is confirmed for me by the saying attributed to Jesus in Saint John's gospel: "Salvation comes from the Jews."
My belief that salvation comes from the Jews is also underscored by Catholic Church Papal teaching. Pope Pius the Eleventh taught: "Anti semitism makes no sense. Spiritually we are all semites."
I would express this by asserting that for any of us who wish to believe in God or to know God, the Jews are our fathers and mothers in faith.
I would also suggest, in  my more deistically inclined moments, that the reason there has been so much historical hatred for the Jewish people is precisely because God has used them to make himself known to all nations.
Again I am postulating a mystical conspiracy theory, to wit: God has used the Jews to make himself known to humanity therefore the devil hates the Jews more than he hates any other people.
In every era, I am suggesting, it is Satan who has sought to demonise the Jews and none other.
But I digress.
Let us return to my attempts at a clinical comparative assessment, ie a non supernatural one, of the Christian idea of God.
The simplicity of the Muslim notion about the oneness of God may not be as resonant or persuasive or indeed irresistable as I have sometimes found it. Simplicity does not necessarily encompass every truth at every level. Occam's Razor, the philosophical methodology formulated by a monk in the Middle Ages based on the notion that the simplest explanation tends to be the best, is not an exhaustive perspective. It doesn't really carry when misapplied, say when one is attempting to conceive of a mapping for a deoxyribonucleic molecule. How much more, may it not carry, when one is considering the mind boggling claims of Christians regarding the reality of God as being one God containing Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
This requires discernment.
The truth is not always most readily summed up in our simplest explanations though simplicity does most certainly seem to a keynote of fundamental truth.
So let's see.
Is there any reality that I have perceived or felt or encountered, that leads me to truly believe God is one and yet at the same time he is three persons in one God?
The testimony of the Catholic church weighs heavily with me.
The testimony of Christians of many disparate churches, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant among them, throughout history weighs heavily with me.
The statements attributed to Jesus in the four gospels, not just his actions, the statements, also seem to demand, well to demand awe, the awe due to God.
According to one gospel witness he said variously:
"Before Abraham was, I am."
"The Father and I are one."
"I am the resurrection..."
These make a strong impression on me.
The experience of life has also, I believe, shown me that the name of Jesus is itself powerful. People cast out demons by that name. The sick are healed. The lame walk, Prisoners are freed. Those of us filled with hate are filled with love instead. The blind see. The dead are restored to life. Selfish people change and give up their lives and their fortunes to educate others. Hospitals are built. And schools. And cities. And nations. All these things are happening now by the power of the name of Jesus.
And they are Godly things.
As for the Holy Spirit also being a person of the godhead, I again find myself looking to the most ancient and continuous traditions espoused by Christians through the 2000 years. It's been a fairly consistent, nay universal, declaration among all those who have lived and died, braved and sacrificed, endured or been martyred, inspired by this faith.
Personally I believe I have felt the touch of the spirit at times and his presence.
I have also had the curious feeling from my teenage years, that if I wanted to speak true or to discern a truth, I had first to stop everything, lay aside a whole lot of baggage, and listen for the spirit, and then trust him.
Most of the time though, I have not done this.
There's more.
There have been two occasions in my life when people have told me that my face shone with some sort of light, once in church at a wedding, and once when I had confessed a sin.
The first time I was fully aware it was happening and that someone else was meant to see it even though my eyes were closed.
The second time I think I was told about it because God wanted me to know from someone else's lips that he was present with me.
My understanding of the notion that a face might become luminous is that such a happening is a gift of the Holy Spirit.
As are music, literature, the arts, healing, prophecy, friendship, understanding, science, wisdom, life and love.
A brilliant debater once stymied me with the simple statement: "We'll never know for sure if God exists or not."
After a moment I ventured a reply.
My reply was: "There is one circumstance in which we will know for sure if God exists or not. If the Christians are speaking truly about Jesus, God is not a secret and we will know. All of us."

Sunday, April 02, 2017

a heelers dictionary


Tautology: Sex And The City 2.

Boozeoisie: Collective noun. Irish people with a median income. Also Irish people on lower incomes. Also Irish people with higher incomes.

Heterosexual panic: When you see a girl so pretty you think you might have to do something about it.

Fine Gael: Irish language term that has entered the English language, meaning an inability to fire a chief of police who is being investigated regarding allegations she framed a hero cop for child abuse.

Sinn Fein: Irish language term that has entered the English language meaning IRA drug dealing people trafficking child abusing bank robbing rackateering devil worshipping terror mafia.

Trade Union: In Ireland a synonym for the IRA.

Prolix: Term of affection, endearment or inducement especially between husbands and wives, ie "You ----ing prolix, make me a cup of ----ing tea."