the story of my argument with one antonio guterres

 

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.

after math

 

long after i have ceased

and cities reached the sky

and fallen down

when pagans 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

the photographer's eye

 

"I don't like seeing the women and children suffering," said the photographer.

He was talking about the war footage Ireland's State funded television station RTE shows nightly from the Gaza Strip. Evidently the Israelis have been turning the place upside down frantically looking for their kidnapped sons and daughters, that is to say the remaining hundred Israeli men, women and children kidnapped by the Gazans from Israel over a year ago and believed held ever since in fetid tunnel dungeons underground. The suffering women and children whose images had so upset the photographer were of course Gazans injured in the resultant war zone which their city has become, not their Jewish hostages. The Israeli men, women and children being held hostage in dungeons by the Palestinians of Gaza have not featured on RTE's nightly coverage. Nor have the 150 hostages released in the early phases of the Israeli retaliation. Nor have the 1200 Israelis torture murdered by the Gazans on the opening day of their attack on Israel a year ago. RTE's nightly sympathy is reserved for the perpetrators of terror rather than the victims of it.

I scratched my bald pate thoughtfully.

Decades ago me n the photographer had worked together in a magazine and today we'd met by chance in the street.

"You're seeing a war zone," I reminded him, "World War Two would have looked the same. You could go to any war zone on earth and find distressing footage. Bear in mind that Ireland has lived with forty years of anti Israel propaganda on RTE. And bear in mind RTE is very selective with its compassion and in its choice of which war zone to feature. It could have spent the last forty years showing you nightly footage of bleeding men, women and children in Sudan where the Islamist government has murdered five million of its own citizens during my life time without any real let up in the violence. Bear in mind that the oppressed Sudanese people haven't bombed anyone, invaded anyone, or torture murdered anyone, or posted video trophies on the internet of themselves racially abusing their victims as they kill them. Nor have the perennially suffering Sudanese people held any kidnapped captives from neighbouring countries in dungeons beneath their cities. All of these crimes the Iranian proxy statelet of Gaza has committed against Israel during the same forty years and in particular over the past year while RTE was ignoring the Sudanese government's ongoing wars against its own people. Incidentally RTE has also all but ignored Zaire, now known as Congo, where the death toll is nearly as high and as random as in Sudan. Ditto Somalia. Ditto Mozambique. Ditto Angola. Even Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's smash and grab on Ukraine receives scanty coverage on RTE compared to the nightly hand wringing from Gaza."

"Why aren't people speaking out?"

"Irish people are quiescent or afraid. The Israelis don't beat people up or murder people or stab children on the streets of Irish towns and cities. Muslim gangs do. It's easier for the citizenry to keep quiet, let RTE do their thinking for them, and hope the crocodile eats them last. And people are terrified of being labelled racist if they speak out against the collapse in immigration law which has brought the Muslim gangs here. And people are very conscious of the fact that an Algerian Muslim man stabbed three children in Dublin a few months ago in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza and there has been no exposition or ongoing discussion or any discourse at all in Irish media about what he did. So people fall silent. They're terrified. And that's where we are."

"Where does it end James?"

"End for who?"

"Well I meant for Ireland."

"It ends with what you see in Haiti and Mexico. It ends with gangs having shoot outs in our streets, it ends with kidnappings and beheadings on a daily basis, and it ends with the thugs controlling our political parties. Yet even that horror show will not be the final destination. I hold with the commentator Mark Steyn on this. For Ireland gang rule is just an interim stop on the way to our true destination. I used to think the Netherlands or France would be the first Western European countries to fall to the Jihadis. Now I think it will be us. Our acquiescence to anti Israeli propaganda is a symptom of a deeper societal malaise that will end with a new dark ages. We've become incapable of standing up to any evil. It ends for us in black Islamic night. Contrary to popular belief old pal, I think the crocodile will eat us first."

trump n proletariat

 

Sitting quaffing a coffee in a cafe with a fine view of hills and plains, I dialled up Padre Baines on the mobile phone.

"Padre did we have a bet on the American elections a few years ago?"

"We did James."

"I think I won a hundred quid off you back in 2016, the year Donald Trump got in."

"You did. I seem to remember you tried to get me to increase the bet to a thousand shortly before the voting."

"Ah Padre, it would have made a great story. We'd have dined out on it. How about another hundred on tonight's result?"

"No way."

"I'll give you your choice. Even money either candidate."

"No. I'm not betting. But who are you supporting, Kamala or Trump?"

"I think Mr Trump is unfit for office," I told him. "And Kamala is more of an abortionist than he is. So I'll be watching but just because I find American democracy so fascinating. I won't have a horse in the race unless you bet with me."

"Sorry James."

Somewhat disconsolately I bid him adieu.

Under Bergoglio the Apostate, the Catholic Church is really losing its dash.

And clearly my incipient gambling addiction is not as cured as I thought it was.

All around the heartland of Kildare, talk seemed to be of the American elections.

At the bookshop in Kildare town the lady proprietor told me a lot of her customers would be staying up to watch the results come in.

The owners of the cafe had told me the same thing.

As I rambled through misty November weathers, an old lady in the street shouted something about me being a Trump supporter.

I was quite bemused.

Later, like about half the population of Ireland apparently, I too stayed up all night watching the results come in by television and computer.

The congenitally anti Trump lefties at NBC were doing a tolerably competent job in suppressing their overt loathing for Mr Trump so I stayed with them most of the night.

Fox News isn't available on television in Ireland as its owners the Australian media mogul Murdock family, fear its availability here would damage their credentials with Euro trash socialists and Jihadis alike. The Murdocks crave the approval of such types and court them copiously through their abysmal Sky News outlet which was available and unwatched by me. Nor was Fox election night coverage being live streamed on the internet. Fox reports were posted on Youtube an hour after their unavailable live broadcast. I thought this was a bad business decision by the Murdocks. I could not trouble myself to watch their recorded footage. Thankfully idiot banks have lent the Murdocks so many billions that bad business decisions or not, the banks themselves cannot afford the Murdocks to go under. Here is the news. They're going under anyway.

The BBC coverage was a yawn fest. How the mighty have fallen. Ditto CNN.

With half the Irish nation staying up to watch the results live, the Bolshevick Irish national broadcaster RTE, funded through compulsory taxation on the gulpens, ie the citizenry, allowed its overpaid staff to go to bed so that they could be fresh as daisies reporting the biggest story on earth in the morning when it was all over.

Glenn Beck had the best internet based coverage with a likeable panel and measured pro Trump commentary.

I stopped watching Ben Shapiro's thoroughly capable coverage when some of the eejits on his panel started smoking cigars. Smoking cigars is not a sign of individuality or bold rebelliousness, and I'll warrant few enough people want to watch eejits smoking them.

The coverage on Mark Steyn's pro Trump website was scanty enough. At first there were no postings at all coming through to my computer but eventually stuff started to appear. I'm not sure if the fault was mine or his. Since Steyn has retreated to the remoter margins of online commentary, being worshipped by a lost tribe of internet trolls as their mad half Belgian, half Canadian, naturalised American, sort of Irish, white god, he's gone full Colonel Kurtz, one moment calling for civil war, the next urging everyone to get out and vote. I've been a bit leery of him since with the rise of Donald Trump a few years ago, he turned turk on both Mr Bush and the war on terror. Mac V had told me to terminate his command at some stage but I found the extended metaphor too wearisome and couldn't really be bothered.

There were copious bomb threats being phoned in to some of the election night count centres. Robert Spencer on his Jihad Watch website seemed sceptical about the FBI's attribution of the bomb threats to Russian email server addresses, a scepticism which I thought spoke more about the bona fides of Mr Spencer himself than about anything else.

During the night word came through that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had just fired his Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. I had regarded Mr Gallant as the man who would be king and I believed the US Biden Administration had conveyed the same idea to Mr Gallant himself, assuring him that he was their favoured choice for Prime Minister of Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu's decision to show him the door on this night of all nights was a sign to me that Donald Trump was about to win the American Presidency.

In the early hours of the morning Irish time, the Pennsylvania count centre attempted their usual shenanigans with Trump leading, announcing a suspension of the count for the night. The Republicans were ready with lawyers and the count continued.

The count in Georgia was slow but the burst pipe shenanigans of 2020 did not materialise.

The count in Arizona actually was suspended but Arizona wasn't the key and nobody seemed to care.

I went to bed at 10 am Irish time waking up in the late afternoon to find a voice message from Padre Baines on my mobile.

The message said: "Well James, I suppose you're delighted. Donald Trump has won again."

I groaned like a heffalump in pain.

No matter what I say or write, I will be remembered near and far in the fantasistic collective imagination of the gnath daoine as an unrepentant Trump supporter.

I quite like the newly elected President's purported Health Department guy Robert F Kennedy though.

He'll last about six weeks working for President Trump.

the heebie jeebies

 

"What do you think is the scariest horror movie of all time?" wondered my cousin Yankee Joe apropos the scariest horror movie of all time.

"I don't really approve of horror movies," I mused cautiously.

"Why not?"

"The hack and slash ones may generate the behaviours they depict. The more subtle evocations of evil may give evil power over people. Generally speaking, as my dear old Dad put it many aeons ago when I was scaring myself witless with the Friday Night Horror on the BBC, I don't think those things help anyone's faith."

"How about Poltergeist?" insisted the unquiet American.

"I would have said that's more an effects movie than a horror. I think it was directed by Tobe Hooper who made the 1970s exploitation flick The Hills Have Eyes. But Steven Spielberg was involved as producer and some say he directed most of Poltergeist and merely had Tobe Hooper there as a sort of affectation. I have a hunch that the little girl who played one of the main roles met an early death in real life as did the girl who played her older sister."

"Well," said Joe, "I read a survey this week that said The Shining was the scariest film of all time."

"It's an eerie thing, I'll give you that," I said. "It's hasn't got a conventional narrative. But there's something about it. A little bit too close to the bone. I think it's one of those ones where I'd be wondering how the director Stanley Kubrick and the writer Stephen King knew so much about evil. I saw it when I was younger and was tremendously disappointed because I had been enthusiastic about Stephen King's writing and had hoped for a good old fashioned entertainment hunkered down in my seat rooting for the forces of good. Nowadays I wouldn't touch it with a forty foot barge pole."

"So you really think a horror movie can have a negative affect on people?" said Joe.

"I do," said I. " You know the horror actor Christopher Lee, star of The Devil Rides Out and sundry others that I wouldn't touch with a forty foot barge pole, was asked at a press conference in Dublin whether he had engaged in occult practices. Word of mouth was that he had. This was shortly before his death. The journalists and the audience were fawning on him and made a great laugh out of the question. But Christopher Lee answered it very seriously. He said that anyone who gets involved in black magic not only risks losing their sanity but their immortal soul."

"Would you watch any horror movie?"

"I choose not to feed my fears. But if John Carpenter's Halloween came on television I'd be saying to God: I'd really love to watch this, it would be a complete nostalgia trip enjoying Carpenter's story telling, his music, the actors' playing, and memories of my younger self being fascinated by the whole thing but I wouldn't watch it for a million pounds. Partly because of the sexualisation of murder as entertainment which is the moral flaw in all hack and slash films. But with Carpenter's the film is more than just graphic exploitation fare. It's not really scary. But there's enough faintly suggested evocations of something supernatural in it to make it more genuinely scary than the more recent gore fests which have been inspired by it."

"How about the Exorcist?"

"Wouldn't watch it if you paid me. I read the book when I was a kid and slept with the light on for twenty years."

"So you've no personal nominee for the scariest movie of all time?"

"On principle no.. But the first of the Omen films was an eerie piece of work. That''s worth an honorable mention. No hang on. I know what I'd nominate as the most scary film of all time. It's another Stephen King one. Salem's Lot. The two part version they made in 1979. Directed by ye aforementioned Tobe Hooper. It's a horror but it's entertainment driven and has some heart. David Soul was in it and Bonnie Bedelia  and the whole cast are excellent. James Mason and the kid particularly. I'd challenge anyone to watch that and not look over their shoulder once or twice. On the other hand I saw David Soul giving a presentation on it recently, and I couldn't escape the feeling that he had been somehow damaged by taking part in the production."

apologia pro vignettes mea

 

Doctor Fortescue looked up from a folder as I came through the door.

He answered my bright, optimistic, quizzical expression with a brief shake of his head.

I thought to myself: Well this is well nigh useless; I won't even get a good dramatic moment for my website out of it; I know some medical professionals personally and not one of them will believe a fellow doctor would pass on news like this in the way he had just done.

There followed some stage business about medications.

"I'll email the prescription to the pharmacy," said the good doctor.

"How long will that take Doc?" quoth me.

"I'll do it straight away," he said.

We shook hands on it and I turned to go.

At the door I found myself unable to resist posing a question apropos nothing at all.

"Do you remember a conversation with me during the supposed pandemic a few years ago?" I asked.

"I do," he said.

"Do you remember I asserted that face masks don't work and that social distancing doesn't work, and that forcing people to stay in their homes under lockdown would damage mental health, and that the vaccines were not properly tested and should not be compulsory and that in any case no one should use the vaccines as they were made out of aborted babies?"

"I remember," said the doctor.

"Have you had any reason since then to revise your opinions?" I ventured.

"I'd probably agree with you on the first three things you said and not on the vaccines," he answered.

"Have you noticed Doc," said I gently, "an awful lot of people are getting heart attacks?"

He flinched.

It was the darndest thing.

He didn't flinch when he read my doom laden chart but he flinched at those simple words.

Instantly I felt strangely sorry for him.

"I know you haven't time to be talking to me all day about current events," I said. "I'll let you get back to your other patients."

As I clumped out the door I was struck, not for the first time, by the strange mystic pathos that gilds the vicissitudinous peregrinations of my effulgent existence.

johanaan

 

(poem for a new baby)

The years mount up

But do not gallop off

Not yet

Though soon they'll run amok

Tonight we are between time

Between destiny, darkness, fortune, and luck

I want to give you a gift

Something that rhymes

But the only theme I can think of

Is an old gag along familiar lines

About the world being at war the day you were born

It is you know

It always was

It will be so in the morn

History itself is a storm

Of souls against the infinite

But the thought rings too violent

For the poem I want

And I am left

With something more prose than poem

Inspiration flees

Now no more words will come

The jungle chirrup of fledgelings in the hedgerow

Draws my eyes to the window

The darkness pulses

As a billion times before

Into something old

Something new

Something murky pure

Grey light becoming white light

The firstlings of the dawn drink the night