an open letter to bishop kevin doran

Kevin.

They're reporting that you have endorsed the use of Flu vaccines developed by Pfizer, Astra Zeneca et al, from the cannibalised bodies of children murdered through abortion.

You shouldn't have done that Kevin.

James H

ireland under the gaelers (the jurisprudence of desmond zaidan et des autres histoires)

(One from the vaults. First published December 2016)

Our latest news round up...

1. An 18 year old girl called Kym Owens has been badly beaten in an attack in the town of Maynooth near where I live. The police are being disingenuous about the full extent of her injuries. No one has been caught.

2. A 37 year old woman called Simone Lee has been beaten, stabbed and tortured with acid in Limerick. Police caught the man who did it, interviewed him, and SET HIM FREE.

3. Irish police have obtained yet another pay rise since their admitted pay scale (the true scale is higher) of 1300 Euro a week was not enough for them.

4. Judge Melanie Greally has released a Muslim man without jail time who stabbed another Muslim man in the head in Dublin. Judge Melanie Greally's understanding of the law apparently means stabbing someone in the head is no longer a jailable offence.

5. Judge Desmond Zaidan issued a warrant for the arrest of a private citizen accused of driving at 35 miles per hour in a 30 mile an hour zone. The private citizen Claire Daly also happened to be a member of parliament. My image of her is that she's a sort of left wing loon extremist abortionist anti American pro Palestine socialist woooooorker (I mean I don't want to go casting no aspoyshuns) who is currently in a relationship with another parliamentarian of similar tripe called Mick Wallace. Mr Wallace owes creditor banks 50 million dollars and yet managed to be elected to parliament in the rotten borough of Wexford on an anti corruption ticket. These people are not my normal bed fellows. I've never met Claire Daly although she dines occasionally at the Chat And Chew restaurant in Newbridge where I also dine. People tell me she is a nice person. I disagree with her political views and I might guess she would be scandalised by mine. But she is a citizen of the Republic of Ireland and an attack upon her is an attack upon all of us. The treatment meted out to her by Judge Zaidan, the police and the courts service, is not just shabby. There's something inherently wrong minded about it. Consider this. Claire Daly was summonsed to court for a speeding fine. Normally there is no requirement to attend court in these cases. If you're not there, you're found guilty and fined. Summonses for speeding fines up until very recently, were not even issued in Ireland unless you exceeded the limit by twelve miles per hour. I would suggest that the procedures adopted in dealing with Claire Daly in this case are doubly dissatisfying, in that firstly the fine should never have been issued, and secondly she should never have been expected to attend court even if a fine had been issued. Claire Daly did actually attend the court where her case was to be heard. Her case had been listed number 188, that is to say last of 188 cases to be heard by Judge Zaidan that day. I suggest that this listing was a third deliberately contrived and illegal inconveniencing of Claire Daly by elements within the police and the courts service. On the day of the court, Claire Daly eventually left the courtroom, having instructed her lawyer to inform the Judge of her plea of guilty to driving at 35 miles an hour in a 30 mile an hour zone, should the case be called. As the court was due to close, Judge Zaidan had reached case 155. In what I consider a fourth contrived, and this time clearly illegal, manoeuvre deliberately targetting Claire Daly, Judge Zaidan skipped the remaining cases and called Claire Daly's case. He then announced that her absence from court was an act of disrespect to the court and issued a warrant for her arrest. At a subsequent court hearing, there were additional non standard procedural manoeuvres when a host of current cases were sent to another court in order to allow Judge Zaidan to deal with Claire Daly's case himself. At this second court hearing Judge Zaidan's attitude in court to Claire Daly was one of calculated arrogance, telling her to "sit up straight" and refusing to allow her a right to speak. I believe his fining of her was also unjust and indeed illegal in these circumstances. But the fine is not the issue. The punishment was the process. What Judge Zaidan and the police and the courts service contrived to do to Claire Daly seems to me to be a deliberate attempt to humiliate a citizen. Their true motivation is perhaps known only to God although the recent parliamentary activities of Claire Daly and her paramour Mick Wallace in highlighting police corruption might offer a clue as to what was at the back of the original summons. I think we must repudiate any such police orchestrated, court assisted and judicially rubber stamped targetting of a citizen (in this instance essentially harassment through a coordinated abuse of due process). I suggest we start by electing our Judges from now on.

6. Corrupt former government Justice minister Alan Shatter has obtained a court order overturning an official government enquiry report into his corruption.

7. White collar criminal Denis O'Brien is using the courts to effectively put parliament on trial in an attempt to remove the right of parliamentarians to comment on his corruptions. The billionaire Fine Gael financier is hoping to silence his critics in parliament by ending their traditional legal right to privileged comment.

8. The Irish parliament has just approved a law legalising cannabis for medicinal use. The law will overnight allow the IRA mafia and its associates in Al Qaeda, the Triads, the Russian mafia and Cosa Nostra, to turn their dirty money into clean money. The law was introduced to parliament by Gino Kenny who represents a left wing grouping styled the Anti Austerity Alliance which I would humbly suggest has been infiltrated by the IRA. In the run up to the passage of the law, which was passed without a vote by the way, we saw some of the shoddiest journalism in the history of the bankrupt Irish Times and Independent newspaper groups. A woman claimed her daughter's seizures were being helped by cannabis use. Her claims were printed without any questioning of their veracity. There was no medical monitoring of the child before or after the administration of cannabis to her. There was no peer review of the claimed alleviation of seizures. What the Irish Times and the Irish Independent failed to consider is the fact that there are some parents who would prostitute their children for a million dollars from the Rah. The IRA's drug trade in Ireland is a multi billion dollar trade.

9. The IRA's drug dealing skang gangs (The Kinahans. the Hutch Gang, the Rattigans et al) are continuing their turf wars in the run up to Christmas. We've had another mobster slaughtered in Dublin this week. (And within days of writing this, another one shot in Cork.)

10. Ireland's largest trade union federation the ICTU which is controlled by IRA rackateers, announced in November that Ireland must take hundreds of Muslim immigrants from a French squatter camp which the French are closing down. Hilarious isn't it. The brave comrades of the Rah, telling us who we must allow to live in our country.

11. Typically vague reports are emerging of an enquiry into the actions of a vicious and evil doctor who among other criminal acts attempted to murder a baby she was delivering at a Sligo hospital and then attempted to murder the mother of the baby on the operating table. The reports of the Irish Medical Council enquiry are quite clinical. Doctors who witnessed her behaviour seem reluctant to make any specific allegation regarding what looks like her blatant attempts to kill two people. They keep describing her actions as "astonishing." Bless their innocence. But of course this murderous psychopath has previous. That is to say following her previous misadventures with patients, she was the subject of previous discreetly held hearings by those sensitive plants at the Irish Medical Council. Their motto should be: "We never accuse a doctor of anything." After their previous hearings the Irish Medical Council had allowed the murderous maniac to continue practicing medicine "under certain conditions" and with "supervision" in spite of her known penchant for trying to kill her patients. This person should be facing a court of law. Instead the courts waste their time harassing Claire Daly. A second psycho doctor facing the thoroughly civilised investigational processes of the Irish Medical Council, has a similar penchant for harming his patients and has had similar good fortune in being continually rehired by Irish Health Boards every time an enquiry discreetly recommends his dismissal. Again the police should be involved. But maybe they're busy planning their next pay claim and strike action.

12. There you go bold readers. So stands compassionate Fine Gaeler Ireland now. The Gaelers have legalised abortion and hell has followed with them. We've got psycho doctors violating and killing patients and being allowed to continue working. We've got Judge Zaidan throwing the book at a member of parliament accused of driving at 35 miles per hour. We've got psychos wandering around dismantling women in our streets. We've got an overpaid police force setting the psychos free when they occasionally do catch one of them. We've got mob controlled trade unions extorting ever increasing remuneration for an indolent phalanx of State employees, nurses, teachers, transport workers, and electricians. We've got the same rackateer controlled unions defining immigration law. We've got the IRA and its associated mafias dealing drugs into every school, every town, every village, every community in Ireland. We've got white collar criminals like Alan Shatter and Denis O'Brien putting the law and free speech itself on trial every time anyone tries to discuss the scope of their criminality. We've got the legalisation of cannabis, a first step towards the legalisation of gangland generally. We've got an ever growing fifth column of Muslim gangs and Jihadis. And they're all of them, all of them sure, we'll never unite to put a stop to them. Mon centre cede. Ma droite recule. Situation excellente. J'attaque.

(First published 4th December 2016.)

THE ARGOMENTO AD GREAT MENO

There are various ways of answering atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins when he claims, citing the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, that there is no God.

One approach is to look at what other great ones have said who differ from Mr Dawkins on the matter.

By great ones, I mean those of a certain grand historical reputation which has elevated them somewhat in human regard and consciousness.

I call this argument for the existence of God, the argomento ad great meno.

Here's a few of my favourites.

Socrates: "It is perfectly certain that the soul is immortal and imperishable, and our souls will actually exist in another world."

Sir Isaac Newton: "Whence is it that Nature does nothing in vain and whence arises all that order and beauty which we see in the world? ...does it not appear from phenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite space, as it were in his Sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them... I don't know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Edmund Burke: "Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy, as religion and not atheism is the true remedy for superstition... Man is by his constitution a religious animal; atheism is against not only our reason but our instincts... There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity, the law of nature and of nations."

Blake: "The atoms of Democritus, Newton's particles of light, are but sands upon the Red Sea shore, where Israel's tents shine so bright."

Charles Darwin: "I deserve to be called a Theist."

Einstein: "I do not deserve to be numbered among those who call themselves atheists."

Arno Penzias (Nobel Laureate); "The best data we have concerning the big bang are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole."

David Berlinski (Mathematician): "General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics resemble two ageing matadors facing the bull of nature, the both of them retiring flustered after a number of half hearted veronicas and ineffective passes. The bull is still there snorting through velvet nostrils. He does not seem the least bit fatigued."

James Healy: "God is."

THE LADY AT THE LAKE

 

Sitting on a bench at lakeside.

A woman emerges from the mist.

"Are you the poet?" she enquires.

I look up from my dispute with Cartman swan who is trying to gnaw my elbow off through the anorak.

"Have you read my poems?" I enquire hopefully while Cartman moves to intercept a duck who's strayed too close.

"No," sez she.

"Then why did you ask am I a poet?"

"That's what people call you," sez she.

Well here's larks gentle travellers of the internet.

We talk for a bit.

"Have you written any poems about the Corona Virus?" quoth she.

"No," I tell her.

"Why not?"

"Different poets are inspired by different things. The Corona Virus doesn't really do it for me."

"Oh."

Then she says: "I'm going home to watch Joe Biden's inauguration. Isn't it great?"

The noble Heelers groans like a Heffalump in pain.

The woman looks at me keenly.

"Do you not think it's great?" she asks suspiciously.

"Oh it's marvellous," I reply. "Let's kill all the unborn children we can get our hands on. Then let's collapse immigration law and label Donald Trump supporters racist. What can possibly go wrong!"

The woman suddenly remembers an urgent appointment and after a hasty adieu hurries away through the mist.

Inspiration dawns.

I feel a new poem coming on.

I muse aloud thusly:

"Shall I compare thee to a Corona Virus?

Thou art indeed more temperate.

Oh Corona Virus.

Fair Corona Virus.

At least you're not Miley Cyrus."

I think this poem has promise.

Just gotta find some way to bring Joe Biden into it.

Driving home from the lake, I am hailed by a gentleman on the outskirts of Kilcullen.

He is waving frantically.

I pull over and wind down the window.

It is Padre Baines.

"Here's the hundred I owe you for our bet on the American election," he says breathlessly proffering a wodge of cash through the window.

I accept it gratefully.

Even in the midst of the apocalypse I am not in the business of refusing wodges of cash from anyone who wants to give em to me. (Cf: Gift horses and ill winds that blow nobody any good.)

another of the aunt's boring stories

The aunt began.

"I met someone you'd have found interesting today. He went out with one of my daughters for a while and he stayed in touch with us when they broke up. He's been working as a guide at one of the museums in Paris. He called to the house today. We talked through the window because of the virus lockdown."

The noble Heelers tried to maintain a polite expression while she gassed away.

I did not expect to be in the slightest bit interested in her visitor, no doubt some privileged supercool high living world traveller who after years of subsidised dating at Irish universities courtesy of the Irish taxpayer, now lived in Paris courtesy of his Daddy's trust fund, and was personal friends of Bono and Bob Geldoff, and blah blah blah. I know the type.

The aunt continued.

"He was working in Paris in 2015 when there was a terrorist attack. Do you know anything about that attack?"

Bored as I was by her story, now I perked up a bit.

This was more like it.

This was my department.

I told the aunt that in November 2015 Jihadis had launched coordinated attacks on Paris, one outside a football stadium, one in the streets, and another in the Bataclan theatre where a rock concert was underway. According to the official death toll, 130 people were killed.

The aunt nodded and resumed her narrative.

"That's the one. He was cycling home from work and he cycled right into the middle of the attack. There were five people dead around him. On the spot he turned to God. Now he travels the world preaching the gospel. He talks about Lourdes and Fatima, He tells people to pray the rosary. You should see him. He wears a crucifix around his neck and rosary beads. He's been arrested all over the place, in Spain and in the Vatican and wherever. I'm not sure why he gets arrested. Maybe it's for travelling during the virus lockdown. Maybe it's something he says. He warns people that we are living through the times foretold in the book of Revelation. He told us he was outside Kilcullen church this morning listening to the mass going on inside. The public aren't being admitted because of the virus. And he was displeased that other services are open to the public but the church is locked."

By this point of her story, I had gone a bit quiet.

Unaccustomed to long silences from me for any story, the aunt paused  and peered at me closely.

"What's the matter?" she said.

I blinked a bit.

It was like there was something in my eyes.

For long moments gentle travellers of the internet, I was too stunned to speak.

the mousetrap

The mouse moved in shortly before Christmas.

I didn't have the heart to evict him.

He seems to live in the piano and occasionally likes to scare the bejabers out of me by stirring around in the big armchair when I'm reclining in it. (Reclining in the armchair not the piano.)

The dogs and the budgie and the parrot have accepted him.

He like the rest of us got his own special Xmas dinner and a new year's dinner (set down on the floor for him) as the holiday season advanced.

As we reached mid January I finally visited a hardware store with a view to ending his sojourn.

"I'm looking for something to get rid of a mouse," quoth me.

"Here's what we have," said the macho storeman, indicating an appalling array of products.

"I mean something that won't hurt him," sez I.

The storeman did not keep the bemusement from his eyes.

"I can order a trap that will confine him, and you can release him outside," quoth he.

"That would be great," sez I.

"In the meantime you might want to try one of these," sez he, "It emits a sonic beam that is only harmful to mice. It should drive him away. It will also drive away spiders and ants."

I placed an order for the humane trap (Mousane surely? - Ed note) but hedged my bets by buying the sonic device.

I took it home and plugged it in.

That was a week ago.

The mouse still lives in the piano and still enjoys rustling about in the armchair when I'm lying in it.

He has given no indication that the sonic device causes him any discomfort.

But two huge hairy spiders have decamped from behind the wall tapestries and moved out of the living room. One has taken up residence in the kitchen. The other is in my bedroom.

This is not an improvement on my situation.

quantum of bowlocks

 Atheistic scientists have grown accustomed to claiming in throwaway remarks that Quantum Theory accurately predicts the width of the United States of America within a margin of error the size of a human hair.

I'm not sure the concept of the width of America to the preciseness of the width of a human hair has any meaning.

America like any conceivable land mass contracts and expands notionally and constantly. A sandbar dries out. That's a different width. A tectonic plate shifts. Another new width. A clod of earth falls off Massachusetts. Woah there baby. That's a lot of human hairs right there.

But does Quantum Theory predict the width of countries if we consider the concept of width within the margin of a human hair to have meaning?

Quantum Theory predicts no such thing.

Quantum Theory is a novelisation of reality written in pure mathematics whose predictions are specifically whatever the framers of the theory put into it.

You cannot go to Quantum Theory to find the width of America, or Britain, or Ireland, or Sumatra, or a human hair.

But if you already know the width of those countries or islands or hairs by measuring them with a ruler, or a metre stick, or a vernier calipers or a machine that has been calibrated from one of those, you can adduce from Quantum Theory that wow the width is what it is, and that's just what we'd expect it to be from some shenanigans interpretation of Quantum Theory.

Quantum Theory can no more be said to predict the width of America, than Tolstoy's War And Peace can be said to predict the results of the Napoleonic Wars.

But wait.

War And Peace is 100 percent accurate in predicting the battles Napoleon fought in Russia.

War And Peace is 100 percent accurate in its representation of the outcome of the battles.

War And Peace is 100 percent accurate in its depiction of big eyed sexy Russian women. (Cf: Evgenia Tarasova, Irina Kuksova, inter alia.)

War And Peace is 100 percent accurate in the names it gives to leading French generals and to leading Russian generals, and to members of Russia's royal family.

So Quantum Theory must be true.

I just feel it, you know.