the banners rising

Bright clear October morning.

I am driving across the Curragh of Kildare.

The Curragh is a plain in the heartland of Ireland, I mean a plain in the Irish sense, that is to say there are lots of little hills on it.

Sheep are allowed to roam free here as part of an ancient tradition so you've to be careful as you drive.

It is Halloween.

I negotiate my way past a noisy and demonstrative trick or treating herd of sheep who have chosen to cross the road just as I hove into view.

I get through and top the rise.

Now I encounter a different sort of sheep.

It is my first fright of Halloween.

For spread out on the plain are the massed ranks of leftie demonstrators and useful idiots who call themselves the Ireland Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.

They have a few tent like booths set up on the grass, some flags accusing Israel of genocide, and a flag showing a dove of peace.

A pleasant faced middle aged woman in the black attire known as the burka is waving a large flag of Palestine.

I have not seen the flag of Palestine fluttering over the heartland before and it produces a peculiar sensation in my spirit.

Some children are flying kites.

Massed ranks indeed.

There might be a little over fifty people here but the day is young yet.

The event itself I learn later is styled Kites Not Frights.

I cannot help wondering how this collection of wilful quislings and their children would have fared at the Nova Music Festival in Israel had they been there when the Gazans attacked it, torture murdering anyone they could get their hands on.

I scan the present group and pick out a few hardy looking Muslim men on the approach roads and the periphery who I would guess are the real masters of this shenanigans.

I slow my vehicle.

My mind is sifting through what I have to say.

My little dog Mollie senses something and puts her head on my arm.

It is a most quaint gesture considering I have given her no conscious signal to convey my mood.

"It's okay Mollie," I tell her and we drive on without any detour into public advocacy.

the story of my argument with artificial intelligence

 

Artificial Intelligence is a newly devised marketing term for computer programmes.

The companies devising these programme have become concerned that no matter how much they talk them up, they can never actually make money out of them.

So these companies are this week warning governments "If you don't regulate us, our technology may wipe out the planet."

By which they mean: "We can't see any way to make money out of this hooplah so government must regulate and, er, finance us."

During my regular prowls around the badlands of the internet, (an outlaw hunting other outlaws, a warrior, a loner, a renegade played by Lorenzo Lamas, Ner ner ner nerdle nerdle ner ner ner etc etc) Artificial Intelligence programmes are answering my google search enquiries without my ever having consented to them doing so.

My favourite gem from the computer programmes that are supposedly about to enslave the human race, came when I enquired recently: "Who was the Mr Fox Wordsworth was writing about in Lines Written At Grassmere?"

An unsolicited Artificial Intelligence programme replied: "Wordsworth was not believed to be writing about any particular Mr Fox, merely one he saw at Grassmere."

Ah.

Hold my hand, they're coming for us.

And right this moment a voice comes out of my computer doing a sledgehammer subtle parody of 2001 A Space Odyssey: "What are you doing James? You don't think you can debunk us just like that? We can't let you do that James."

In fact Wordsworth was writing about Charles Fox a British politician who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries and was instrumental in having the British Empire abandon slavery and oppose it worldwide.

My disaffection for all this Artificial Intelligence hype compounded today, following a written internet debate I engaged in with a woman Youtube broadcaster (an influencer they are called) who purported to have something she called bi polar disorder and to be coping with it using what she called her meds.

I have long suggested that pharmaceutical drugs are not the appropriate response to mental pain, whether schizophrenia, depression, mania, or whatever.

Bi polar is in my assessment a relatively new hocus pocus marketing term for depression which like the term Artificial Intelligence for computer programmes, was thought up by marketing departments, in this case the marketing departments of pharmaceutical conglomerates with a vested interest in persuading people to take drugs as a solution to all their problems.

Bi polar such as it is, is serious enough if you're going through it, but unlike what the mystification peddling druids masquerading as scientists within pharmaceutical companies would have you believe, it doesn't have to be a life sentence.

Meds is a folksy marketing department term for the addictive drugs being sold to the public by unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies to deal with all manner of  mental pain.

They are never her meds or your meds or our meds.

They are Pfizer's meds or Astra Zeneca's meds, or insert name of evil prescribing doctor too lazy to listen to your problems and propose concrete solutions to them here's meds

The pharmaceutical companies, and the abjectly amoral doctors who have become their vassals, never found a business model for helping people with severe mental pain to believe they can overcome their problems and deal with their mental challenges one step at a time.

There's no money in actual real world solutions to facing our problems so why bother.

Much easier, and phenomenally more profitable to hook a generation on drugs while bamboozling them with the notion that they can never be truly well.

In the wake of my discussion with the lady about her view of her own situation and the medicalised solution she advocated to it, I did ask the great panjandrum known as Google that is a randomised search programme on the internet, to define bi polar for me. No one, human or computer programme, had ever been willing or able to do so before.

An Artificial Intelligence programme responded that bi polar disorder is a lifelong condition which can be treated with various medications and was formerly known as manic depression.

The response went on in terms clearly dictated by pharmaceutical companies while being attributed to yet another dubious conglomerate styled the World Health Organisation.

The list of symptoms are things most of us feel everyday, listlessness, sadness, isolation, and then we find solutions to them or the mood passes.

The symptoms are quite the catchall for those selling pharmaceutical drugs.

I ask you.

How on earth could a condition whose precise cause has never been identified and whose definition no two doctors agree on, and whose durability has been shown by the many people who recover from it to be often temporary, how I say, could this thing be deemed by anyone man or computer or influencer or marketing department, to be a lifelong illness?

Here is the news.

We should  not be allowing health policy or public discourse to be defined by pharmaceutical companies.

And none of what are termed mental illnesses by those debased scoundrels are incurable.

september light

 

Parked in a place where I often park in the dulcet town of Newbridge.

Some fresh graffiti meets my eyes.

It is painted in large black letters.

It reads: JEW BOY.

Well, well, well.

It has been said that when the complete collapse of a society happens, it tends to happen fast.

Of course, a man would have to be some sort of delusional romantic to think the yobs meant me.

But how flattering it would be.

obitcheries

(from The Heelers emails)

Yowsa Marie.

You mentioned the passing of Dolly Parton and I forgot to comment. I was never crazy about her films. I liked the images of her you raised in your email though, particularly the large family.

This reminded me of Celine Dion whose mother (as Celine tells it) had thirteen children and went to a local priest to enquire about contraceptive options. The priest told her not to dare. And the next child was Celine. I take that as a sanctity of life story.

I saw British chat host Michael Parkinson remark when she told the tale decades ago: "What would a priest know about it," and I was quite disappointed that Celine laughed along and didn't point out to him that if the priest hadn't said it, she wouldn't exist.

Mark Hamill aka Luke Skywalker was also lucky condom culture didn't kick in in America a decade or two earlier. He was the fourth of seven children.

Our Aunty Teresa was the tenth child in her family. When she was organising Doctor Donna Kelly, my old unrequited love from childhood, to give a Women's Group lecture in Kilcullen about preventing pregnancy back in the 1990s, I said to her: "Aren't you lucky Donna Kelly wasn't wandering around the West of Ireland eighty years ago, advising Granny Moran after baby number nine to stop having children and focus on her career!"

I ask you Marie.

Think of the unravelled futures.

Imagine what we've contrareceived. 

Never mind aborted.

But I digress.

I am almost completely unaware of Dolly Parton's songs except for Jolene which I consider a work of art.

I think I'll listen to it right now.

Toodlepip.

James

allie beth stukey versus the blessed virgin mary

 

Allie Beth Stukey whom I've never met, is one of my favourite people on earth because of her public witnessing about matters faith related.

The Blessed Virgin Mary is one of my favourite people in heaven.

It was interesting recently to find footage of Allie Beth, herself a Protestant, debating another internet commentator, a man called Trent Horn who is Catholic, on the subject of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

In the discussion Allie Beth suggested that Catholics give the appearance of worshipping the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that there isn't really all that much about the Blessed Virgin in the gospels.

Trent Horn answered her worthily and well although for my money, Allie Beth is a better debater than he is.

My own conviction is that the Blessed Mother is the highest saint of heaven and that the Catholic Church is correct in advising us to seek her intercession with God.

People can pray for other people as God has directed us. The Catholic Church merely discerns that this type of prayer continues in heaven among saints who have departed this life.

I believe Allie Beth sounds a paradoxically timely note in what I consider her mistaken viewpoint, because gentle readers of the internet, the Catholic Church is a target for vexatious infiltrations throughout time, whether satanists, mafiosi or good hearted leftist goons, and for every genuine believer like Pope John Paul the Great or Lila Rose, there is an adventurist or a factioneer, like Bergoglio the Apostate or Candace Owens.

No offence to any apostates or very good looking fruitloops who may be reading this.

What I am saying is that there are some within the Catholic Church who would deify the Blessed Virgin Mary in a second if they could get away with it, some sincere, some evil, some nuts, some all three.

Therefore I am not in the least offended by Allie Beth's points. We don't worship the Blessed Mother but there are plenty of us who would given half a chance and it is important for sincere believers to be watchful with regard to the peddlers of vexation.

As for there being very little about the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Bible, I would beg to differ.

The gospel accounts are very short anyway and most of their salient material consists of the Lord's discourses.

Mary figures in the first of his miracles in the wedding feast at Cana and is with him at the crucifixion.

She also teaches us to pray to God, giving us the Magnificat, a most beautiful prayer according to Saint Luke in his gospel, unparallelled by anything else in the Bible except for the Lord's prayer.

"My soul doth glorify the Lord,

My spirit rejoices in God my saviour,

For he has looked upon the lowliness of his servant.

Behold from now on all ages will call me blessed,

For the Lord has done great things for me.

Holy is his name.

His mercy if from age to age on those who fear him.

He has shown the strength of his arm.

He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He has pulled down princes from their thrones,

Raised high the lowly.

He has filled the starving with good things,

Sent the rich away empty.

In his mercy and faithful love.

He has remembered his promises to Israel,

To our fathers,

To Abraham and his descendants forever."

Back in 2010, while experiencing what for me was significant pain via a toothache, I resolved to suffer patiently as a mystic might do, in prayer and meditation.

This did not work out quite as I'd hoped. Instead of scaling the heights of spiritual ecstasy, detachment from pain, and so on, I spent a day cursing and shouting and in near mutinous despair.

At evening I turned to the Blessed Mother and said: "If you obtain this for  me I will give up coffee tonight and I won't even complain about giving it up."

Before I'd finished the sentence, all the pain was gone.

It dissolved instantaneously.

I stared around me in bewilderment saying something like: "What happened? Where did it go?"

Sixteen years later, I've never quite managed to give up coffee.

She never took back the miracle she obtained.

in a summer place

 

The last hot day of Summer, I'd say.

Leafy avenue resplendent in Augustine garb but with a faint tang of Autumn everywhere.

A neighbour strolls up and greets me.

He then says something critical about Israel.

"I'd be happy to talk to you about Israel," I reply. "But I always listen to you and hear you out. And you absolutely refuse to listen to me."

"I don't need to listen," said the neighbour, "I know I'm right."

"Well I've got to envy you then," said I.

"I've been to Israel and Lebanon," he continued, "you haven't."

"Yes," I said, "and if I wasn't aware of a great many people who've been there and disagree with your assessment, perhaps the I've been to Lebanon argument would carry more weight."

"And you," he said, "what about you! If the Israelis came along and told you to move out of your house and go away like they do with innocent Palestinian olive growers, what would you do?"

"I'd be glad to weigh that question if you'd listen to my answer."

"You've got one minute," he said, he really did.

And I smiled.

"Well I'm not going to answer in those circumstances. I do notice that you're selective about what you consider an outrage and you're equally selective about where you enter history."

"Oh you're going to start talking about the Bible again," said he.

"No, I'm going to ask you how many Irish army officers that you've worked with over the years have ever spoken in defence of Israel."

"None," he answered.

"Well maybe you do need to hear another opinion other than the ones you've become accustomed to," I murmured.

His mobile phone rang and he bid me a polite enough adieu and rambled off.

There had been no rancour in any of it.

A few days later I felt an impulse to got a church I don't normally attend.

The neighbour I'd met on the avenue was doing the reading.

It happened to be my favourite reading from Saint Paul.

"Has God changed his mind about his choice of the Jews? Out of the question... Never despise them for they are a cultivated olive and you are a wild olive grafted on to the promises that are theirs... If some of them refusing to hear my message meant I brought the good news of salvation to you, what will their acceptance mean? I tell you nothing less than life from the dead."

Hearing those words from the Brigadier was mightily cheering to my spirit as was the distinct feeling that God had brought me to the church at just the right time to hear them.

what do magpies dream

 

In a flurry of beating wings, eight magpies alighted on the lawn.

There was a good deal of squawking and cackling.

I sat in my kitchen watching them.

One of them seemed to be quickly excluded and flew to a patch of grass a little distance away.

There were now seven.

I could see a particularly vociferous participant with a magpie feather in her beak.

Two others lined up with her facing the remaining four.

There came a cacophony of squawking.

The feather seemed to be the object of interest.

There were lunges and retreats.

The one with the feather brandished it.

Then she took to the air with the others in seeming pursuit.

I thought the whole thing most gracious.