in time of the freaking out of nations

Sitting in Farmer Jones front room.
Four dogs and three cats are lolling, strolling, mullocking and meditating in various postures around me.
Puppy, Maggie, Snowy, Harry, Tiger, Chip and Marmalady.
If the Murdocks hadn't pulled the plug on Fox News in Europe all would be right with the world.
As it is, the only blot on my escutcheon television is CNN.
Still.
Any tripe in a storm as Kim Jung Un will not be saying for very much longer.
The creatures arrayed around me in oddly contented harmonies call up to my consciousness the old question as to whether animals go to heaven.
CS Lewis once opined that the idea of the lion lying down with the lamb as expressed in the Bible prophecy should not be taken too literally.
He suggested that a lion sitting peaceably with a lamb would no longer really be a lion.
I think his imagination might have failed him on this one point.
I suspect that one day the lion in his glory will indeed sit down with the lamb and both will be more glorious than we have ever known them.
I saw a parody of the fulfillment of the prophecy years ago when Pope John Paul The Great met with the old communist Mikhail Gorbachev.
And I am seeing a shadow of its fulifillment now this very afternoon in Farmer Jones front room with the cats and dogs in peaceful profusion sitting around me watching the worst news channel on the planet.

yet another hurricane devastates ireland

(A short satire on the weather reporting style of  CNN, the BBC, RTE, NBC, ABC, the Irish Times, the New York Post, et al, particularly Al. I hate him.)

Hurricane Noirin O'Sullivan has resigned from her role as Chief Of Police in Ireland, leaving a trail of devastation in her wake.
Citing difficulties in concentrating on her work because of a series of ongoing official enquiries into police corruption, Hurricane Noirin scarpered with a lump sum payout in excess of a quarter of a million dollars.
She will also receive an annual pension of about a hundred thousand dollars a year in recognition of her successes in devastating the rule of law in Ireland.
That's Ireland folks.
The only country on earth that pays its hurricanes to devastate them.
I kid you not.
Among the Top Ten things Hurricane Noirin may not have liked being enquired about were:
1. Her possible role in the framing of a hero cop for child abuse.
2. An IRA mafia money laundering racket at the police training school.
3. The deliberate concealment by police of Ireland's stratospheric murder rate, a concealment carried out through the simple expedient of the police not including the murders that were taking place in their formal murder statistics.
4. The falsification of a million roadside tests for drunk driving, ie the cops claimed they'd tested a million people when none of the claimed million tests had taken place. Since a drink driving test kit costs a specific sum, the implication is again that the Irish police had devised yet another money laundering trick around the non existent tests.
5. Hurricane Noirin's refusal to produce any of her mobile phones to any committee of enquiry into police corruption, on the grounds that she couldn't find them. (The mobile phones, not the committees.)
6. Hurricane Noirin's novel solution to public concerns about corruption in the upper ranks of the police force, ie she moved all the precinct chiefs to new precincts.
7. Public concerns about IRA infiltration of the police.
8. Public concerns about other rackateers infiltrating the police.
9. Claims that the police bugged the offices of the organisation charged with monitoring police corruption.
10. Public concerns about a Chief of Police whose husband is also a high ranking police officer.
11. Public concerns about the complete break down of trust between the public and the police force we remunerate so highly.
12. Public concerns about Mafia Judges awarding huge payouts to police officers who claim to have been injured on the job or traumatised by exposure to crime.
13. Public concerns that the police force of the Republic of Ireland is individually and institutionally corrupt.
14. Hurricane Noirin's role as right hand man to her predecessor the infamous Joe Callanan, and the manner in which she came to take the top job when the Irish government had expressly promised not to hire an insider as Chief of Police.
15. Hurricane Noirin's insistence that she would nor resign as scandal after scandal engulfed the Irish Police Force and the exact reasons why the Irish government concluded they couldn't fire her.
16. Hurricane Noirin's failure to deal with the IRA skang gangs currently terrorising every village, town and city in Ireland while simultaneously dealing drugs into every school in Ireland.
18. Public concerns about the framing of socialist parliamentarian Claire Daly on frivolous charges of breaking the speed limit by five miles per hour. Also, public concerns about the police illegally arresting Claire Daly on a warrant issued by Judge Desmond Zaidan. (As a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, I consider Judge Zaidan's behaviour towards Claire Daly to be emblematic of arrant corruption.)
19. Public concerns about the collapse of immigration law amid collusion between elements of the police force and IRA people traffickers.
20. Public concerns about the police failure to combat the war between two IRA drug gangs styled the Hutch Gang and the Kinahan Gang who are currently tearing our country to pieces.
21. Public concerns about the police turning a blind eye to the Triads, Cosa Nostra, MS13, the Zetas, the Russian Mafia, Nigerian devil worship rings, Muslim Gangs, Al Qaeda, Tinker Gangs and of course the IRA and their Sinn Fein proxies in parliament who as Capo's Di Tutti Capi are dividing Ireland up into medieval fiefdoms, allotting respective portions and zones of action to the approxiamately one hundred and thirty major international mafias known to be headquartering here.
22. That's enough Hurricane Noirin. - Ed note.
23. You're right it is. - Heelers note.

after math

long after i have ceased

and cities reached the sky and fallen down
when pagan nations have fulfilled their truth
and passed

a race of men will till the isthmalian plane
a woman croon her babe in an african shade
and some still follow the christ

darkness has closed in
as many times before it closed
but it shall not win
it shall not win

waiting for a hurricane

As a large storm system advanced across the Carribean last week I couldn't help noticing some panicky bathos in the reportage.
All the English language news services seemed to be gripped by a sort of hysteria.
The presenters were emoting like Captain Kirk.
It struck me that they might perhaps be exaggerating a little.
As the "biggest storm ever" advanced into Florida, the good burghers of Euronews were still claiming it was a Category Four storm while the cool Gallic exaggerateurs of France 24 were trying to excite us with breathless descriptions of "un tres grand vent" which they admitted had quickly decreased to a slightly less dramatic Category Two.
Well which was it?
People died.
As they do when Continental weather systems bouleverse a region.
But it seemed to me that the continual proclamation: "This is the biggest storm ever," was a bit of a stretcher.
I remember Hurricane Katrina in the year 2005 killing around 1500 people in New Orleans and surrounding areas.
From that point of view by the grace of God, this thing we had last week didn't come close.
A monsoon storm in Pakistan in 2010 flooded great swathes of that country (although it did not cause any noticeable interruption to Pakistan's vital Jihad and nuclear weapons industries).
The Pakistanis claim that a fifth of the country was flooded and 1700 people died.
Even allowing for standard Pakistani Islamist exaggerations when seeking free money from the international community (with whom they're waging continuous Jihad war lest we forget) we might still postulate that what happened in Pakistan was genuinely "big," and not just big in the CNN/Fox News/CBS/NBC/ABC/BBC sense of that word, (ie small).
Clearly this month's storm Irma in Florida and storm Harvey in Texas, both of which CNN has been trumpeting as something kin to the apocalypse, resulted in far less deaths and flooding than either Katrina or the Pakistani monsoon of recent memory.
My own view is that the news channels are turning every storm into the "worst ever" by choosing a particular metric, in Irma's case the width of the storm area, in Harvey's the rainfall, in order to dramatise it into the worst ever.
The media networks are doing this gentle travellers of the internet because they want you to believe in an arcane little fiction they call Climate Change.
I am not understating the storms the Americans have lived through in the past few weeks.
Nor am I diminishing the hardship, tragedy and death arising from any hurricane.
I am though accusing CNN, the BBC, and their ilk, of spuriously inflating the actual effects and possible effects of these storms in the interests of promoting a Climate Change agenda.
I think they should call the next hurricane Storm Anderson Cooper.
After all is said and done Anderson Cooper of CNN was to the fore in the hyperbole stakes and he along with the rest of them finally succeeded in panicking the Governor of Florida into evacuating six million people from the State.
I'd say if you tallied up the car accidents and heart attacks, the evacuation probably killed more people than the storm.

*****

Footnote 13th September 2017: The official death toll in Florida is going up and down between six and twelve people depending on which agency is making the claims. It seems the authorities are desperate to prove someone (anyone) actually died as a direct result of the hurricane that led those same authorities to issue an evacuation order for six million people. What has become clear is that fully half of the twelve deaths currently being claimed for Hurricane Irma occurred in road traffic accidents. At least one other death was a heart attack. No disrespect to "the biggest storm of all time" but I'm beginning to wonder did it actually kill anyone.