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

the mask of the daft hayporths

 

Shopping in a small town pharmacy for some product a fellow citizen wants me to get her.

A fetching young woman with a nose ring goes to fetch the product.

I do not endorse nose rings generally but she could kind of carry it off in a subtle, sylph like, sensual, sexual sort of way.

While she is gone a fetching, I espy a public health campaign poster on the wall.

The poster features an image of the deceased musician styled Freddie Mercury performing on stage with a  health board parody of his most famous song emblazoned in large letters beside him.

The song as written on the poster has been rejigged to urge people to wear face masks presumably during the international and interminable flu virus shenanigans of recent years.

The health board's parody reads:

"No mask on your face

Big disgrace

Spreading your germs all over the place."

It is not clear to me how Freddie Mercury could have given his consent from beyond the grave for the use of his image and his song to promote such nonsense.

It is by no means a safe assumption that he would have gone along with it if he had lived.

Some other equally famous though still living musicians, to wit Eric Clapton and Van Morrison, risked their standing and good names, to defy the conformist hysteria which health boards and governments at the behest of shadowy figures manipulating the World Health Organisation, attempted to impose on the public via face masks, social distancing and vaccines made out of aborted babies, during what has now been revealed as a thoroughly artificially induced Covid 19 panic lasting several years.

By the way, I mean both the panic and the flu itself were artificially induced, since the panic was entirely unnecessary and the virus had been manufactured in a laboratory using non lethal viruses taken from bats by Chinese communist party scientists at Wuhan which had been deliberately turned into more dangerous viruses that human beings could catch, a criminally adventurous process known as gain of function research, intended to make yet another fortune for pharmaceutical companies in vaccine development and carried out using funding from Anthony Fauci then head of the American National Institute of Health.

That's some dark cabal right there: The Chinese Communist Party, Pharmaceutical Companies, the World Health Organisation and Anthony Fauci.

I kid you not.

And the information I've given above is precisely what billionaire social media mogul Mark Zuckerberg this week admitted the FBI had compelled him to censor from Facebook at the height of the government mandated Covid 19 hysteria.

Incidentally it shows a peculiar though not surprising lack of taste for Irish health boards to hijack the late Freddie Mercury without his consent for their supposed hygiene campaign since the man died of Aids, a disease he contracted by engaging in markedly unhygienic sexual activities with multiple partners of the same gender as himself, and I might add, a disease to which the international response from the 1980s to almost the present, was led by no less a personage than Doctor Anthony Fauci of the American National Institute of Health whose sole response to the Aids crisis, aside from developing vaccines that could never work as their aim was to make inherently unsafe behaviour safe, his catchall solution to Aids I say, was to urge people to use condoms when engaging in the sexual debaucheries which were killing them.

But I digress.

Back in small town Ireland, the nose ring girl had returned to the counter.

"I see you're still going on with that face mask rubbish," I commented politely.

"Oh that poster has been there for years," she smiled.

"You know the face masks don't work?" I said.

"I do," said she.

"You're humouring me, aren't you?" said I.

"I am," said she.

Her nose ring seemed to glimmer most wooingly.

In the half light of that poky little small town pharmacy, I saw no shadow of another parting.

our television listings

 

RTE 1

9am. JUDGE JUDY: Belicose New York harridan berates vulnerable people who really want to be on TV.

10am. MURDER SHE WROTE: Jessica discovers that the Covid 19 flu virus was engineered in a Chinese Communist Party laboratory at Wuhan with funding from Doctor Anthony Fauci of the American National Institute of Health. There's an unrealistic side plot about the World Health Organisation forcing people to wear face masks, engage in social distancing (ie standing at least two metres from each other) while ingesting vaccines made out of aborted babies.

11am. MOST HAUNTED: A frighteningly bad television programme.

12 midday. HOW RTE GOT ITS GROOVE BACK: In house documentary about RTE's renewal of its slander war against the Catholic Church. After being caught in 2011 paying an African to frame Father Kevin Reynolds for fathering a child, RTE might have been forgiven for easing off a bit or even for being a tad embarassed about its crass Marxian bigotries. But no. A decade later those lovable IRA proxies in the documentary deparment are back with all new programmes intended to stampede our drugged up debauched peasantry away from the ancient church. This programme looks at RTE's revitalised strategy against the Christian faith part of which inolves slandering dead priests such as Bishop Eamon Casey as they are less likely to sue and, more importantly for the crypto fascists at RTE, lesss able to defend themselve. There will also be a preview of another forthcoming RTE documentary series entitled Stolen, recycling the Magdalen launderies libel, in which the channel tries to persuade the abortion generation of Irish people that they are superior morally to those who came before us. The programme's peculiarly manipulative inuendo laden vilification focusses on past generations provision of adoption procedures for children of single mothers along with their provision of respite care homes for those mothers while ignoring the present generation's solution to all such matters, to wit the industrial scale systematic killing through chemical and surgical abortions of supposedly unwanted children in the womb. RTE are such humanitarians you guys.

1pm. NEWS: (That's enough RTE - Ed note) (Too right it is - James note)

the clash of civilisations

 A phone call from Yankee Joe.

Our talk ranges.

"Do you know Graham Linehan?" the Yank enquires at some stage.

"You mean the Cork man to whom the BBC gave mllions so that he might present an unwatchable chat show just because they thought he was attracted to people of the same gender as himself only to discover that everyone in Cork talks that way and that Graham is actually by Corkonian standards the ultimate macho man, in effect the Arnold Schwarzeneggar of Cork?"

"No I mean the guy who writes comedies. I presume you're talking about Graham Norton. I'm talking about Graham Linehan."

"Who he?"

"He's only the man responsible for some of the best TV comedies of the past thirty years."

"Such as?" I venture, fascinated that Graham Linehan could be off my radar having created Seinfeld, Friends and the Larry David Show.

"Black Books, Father Ted, and The IT Crowd," clarified the cousin. "All of them sheer comic gold."

"Ah Cousin," I remonstrated, more in sorrow than in astonishment at his lack of taste. "A great gulf opens up between us. It's like when I'n talking to the Brigadier about Israel. It's not just that we disagree. It's that we're on entirely different planets. Sheer comic gold? No, no, surely not. Sad post modern cyncial joyless drivel more like. But why do you bring up the immortal Linehan? You'r not just sticking it to me, are you?"

"He's been cancelled," explained the Yank. "He wrote something critical of transgenderism on a website and, boom, he lost everything: his marriage broke up; his friends don't want to know him; he can't get work in television. He'd been concerned about transgenderism because he feared the cultural promotiion of it might affect his own daughter. Can you believe he could lose everything at a stroke?"

"All for stating the truth about mutilating sex change operations which don't work, eh?" I mused, "But isn't there an irony here? I mean he played a not insignificant role in creating the present collapse in common sense societal moral values which has led to sex change operations and cancel culture. And he did it through the very comedies you love. I'm suggesting that the anodyne conformist sleazoid trash with which he cluttered up the airwaves on behalf of the amoral BBC and deparaved Channel Four, has led in a linear fashion to cancel culture itself. Now he's hoist on the monstrousness of the anti life anti Christian bigotries he himself fostered, Petard I mean."

"Jean Luc Petard?"

"No. Hoist on his own petard."

"Aw Heelers. You gotta have some sympathy for the guy."

"Actually Joe," I said ruminatively, "for the first time I think I'm starting to see a bright side to cancel culture."

a long overdue tribute to author broadcaster journalist photographer poet blogger and all round humanitarian brian byrne

 

One of my dogs went missing earlier this week.

Unbeknownst to me a delivery man at Supervalu shopping centre noticed the dog wandering on Main Street and brought her to the Guards, the Irish police force.

The Guards notified Brian Byrne that they had a lost dog in their possession.

Brian Byrne put a photo of the dog on his Kilcullen Diary website.

Kindly neighbours recognised her and phoned me.

The police had the dog back at my house two and a half hours after she first went missing.

lengthening shadows

 

Last week an assassin attempted to kill US Presidential candidate Donald Trump at an election rally.

Shooting from a rooftop and using a high powered  rifle the assassin hit Mr Trump in the ear and killed audience member Corey Comperatore a retired firefighter.

He also wounded two other audience members.

Before the rally a Catholic priest styled Father Jason Charron blessed the crowd in a public prayer.

Father Charron seems to me a decent and genuinely holy man, touched by the light.

In Greek mythology a character called Charon is the ferryman who brings deceased souls across the river Styx to the land of the dead.

echoes

 

"Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it," some once famous wag is reputed to have said.

Another famous wag purportedly remarked; "History is bunk."

Today the internet is alive with chatter from the lunatic fringe of the Catholic Church predicting the end of the world.

They won't always be wrong.

In their meanderings and maunderings I hear echoes of earlier times.

I'm somewhat rueful about such things.

I've thought it was the end of the world since my childhood.

A book and film entitled The Late Great Planet Earth appeared when I was preparing for the Leaving Cert exam, claiming the world would end in 1986.

I was quite frustrated about this as it left me just enough time to complete my school examinations as mandated by the Irish educational system.

In the intervening years I've never believed we were in the middle of anything other than the Apocalypse.

The mass murders perpetrated by communist regimes in China, Russia and Africa throughout my lifetime looked to me like the Apocalypse.

The abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide culture of America and Europe looked to me like the Apocalypse.

The rise of drug gangs dominating towns, villages, cities and countries throughout the world looked to me like the Apocalypse.

There's a one liner in the book of Revelation that goes something along the lines of: "In spite of all the horrors they are seeing, people will not stop their murders, their fornications, their sacrifices to satan and their thefts."

That looks very much like precisely what we have not stopped doing in the face of the evils engulfing our world.

At the present moment I seem to hear more yet stranger echoes from history,

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's smash and grab on Ukraine is likenable to Stalin's attempt to conquer Finland in 1939 as the world was distracted by Nazi Germany going toe to toe with England and France in what would become World War Two.

I'm suggesting the bloodbath of Ukraine, like the earlier bloodbath in Finland, is actually a side show to the real World War which is unfolding contemporanously. The Ukrainians like the Finns have decided not to roll over.  But the real World War like the last one, involves the culmination of a hell inspired attempt to wipe out the nation of Israel whose present day foes in my assessment are the equivalent of the Nazis.

Israel may seem small and distant to us here in Ireland.

Yet Ireland and Britain and Western Europe and the USA have in recent months all been roiled as never before by pro Palestinian street demonstrations whose participants seek to eradicate Israel from the map.

Many among our own political pseudo elites are scared stiff of the restive Muslim populations that have moved into our midst.

Israel is far away but the war against her is here and now, and indeed everywhere and in every era.

I would instance the British government Justice Minister Mike Freer who a few months ago received threats from Muslim activists and promptly resigned.

People have to be fairly ambitious and determined to become British Justice Ministers dontchya know.

Mr Freer walked away in five minutes when he discovered who was threatening his life.

Let me be clear.

A new world war may indeed involve seemingly diverse elements such as the continuing charnel house in Sudan, or a Chinese attempt to take Taiwan, or the Chinese vassal North Korea devastating South Korea, or Putin going nuclear on his victims.

My profound conviction remains that the epicentre in some strange high mystical sense is still Israel.

Just like in World War Two when the Nazis found time while undertaking the conquest of twenty nations, ie humanity, to try to wipe out the Jews.

I see other echoes from the past in current events.

Putin's provision of nuclear technology and high ordinance weaponry to Muslim thug States like Iran, is likenable to Stalin's arming of Hitler. Putin's secret machinations with Iran and its ilk may be likened to the 1939 signing of the Soviet Nazi non aggression pact between communist Russia and Nazi Germany. In the end Stalin's alliance of convenience with the Nazis cost Russia many many millions of lives as the Nazis inevitably turned on their former benefactors,

I have a feeling Putin's maniacal attempt to farm the Islamic Republic of Iran will end the same way.

And in September last year when Muslim Azerbaijan launched a surprise attack on Armenia, Putin, the spider of the Kremlin, did not use his army to help the Armenians, precisely so that Armenia would be humiliated militarily and rendered completely dependant on him for security in the future.

Putin further refused to aid the Armenians a few months ago when Azerbaijan seized the Armenian inhabited exclave of Nargorno Karabakh and expelled its 105,000 Armenian inhanbitants.

I liken Putin's inaction duringt he Azeris depradations in Nagorno Karabakh to Stalin holding back the Red Army at the gates of Warsaw in 1944 as the Nazis massacred the Polish citizens of that city.

Stalin's failure to help the Poles was intended to weaken Poland to such an extent that it could later be more readily incorporated into what would become the Soviet bloc.

Back to the present.

While all this is happening my assessment is that the Vatican, the moral conscience of the world, is in the hands of a false Pope.

India, sometimes styled the world's most populous democracy, has just elected a politician to high office in the Tamil Nadu region whose name is Stalin and whose father, also called Stalin, is a power broker in that region.

Can you hear the echoes?

The Stalins of India are quite open about the fact that they were named after the aforementioned Russian mass murderer Joseph Stalin.

Stalin is their first name, not their family name.

So no current revelation about the Russian Stalin's murder of thirty million people (and counting) has been enough to deter the Hindu Stalins from using the name as an honorific.

Stalin pere is ranked the 22nd most powerful man in India.

Father and son say they are atheists but claim not to have any particular hostility to religion.

Classy, classy people.

Meanwhile, the United States of America having been governed for four years by President Joe Biden, a man who doesn't know what he believes, now looks set to re elect Biden's predecessor former President Donald Trump, a man who believes in nothing.

Yet another formerly famous wag has supposedly noted: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce."