“I’m BACK”

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Now, where was I?

Oh yes, I was on about this troublesome life we all lead.

Well, you may have noticed that it has just got a lot more troublesome lately. We are, apparently, in the grip of a pandemic so dastardly that we have had to shut down the economy because of it. The climate appears not to be changing anymore or at least, we are not hearing about it if it is. The war-making Yanks have temporarily ceased invading other countries but strangest of all, the pubs are shut. Every red-blooded Irishman knows that the pubs only shut two days a year and we even got that down to just one day by last Easter Friday. But they’ve been shut now for two weeks so something really serious must be going on.

I tend to rely on the numbers when it comes to most things because in theory, the numbers do not lie. As of this morning, 2nd April 2020, we have had 88 deaths in Ireland from the virus since this all began. So there is my first question. When did it all begin? Some say the virus hit China as early as last November but we cannot be sure when the first infection took place in Ireland, making numbers in this regard a tad inaccurate as a result. So as the Indo. says this morning, we can rely on the number of actual deaths because we have bodies to prove it. We know when they died,, what they died of and how many of them there were. That is a hard number.

Another hard number provided by the Central Statistics Office is the annual death rate in Ireland. This has hovered consistently around the 30,000 souls per year for the last several years, meaning that 80 people die every day on average in the State, virus or no virus. That’s a hard (average) number also. The first death from the virus here happened on the 11th March, exactly three weeks ago. In those same 21 days since then, 1,680 people in Ireland also died, (from all causes). I have not asked the CSO and it would be far too early to anyway, but were the 88 virus deaths part of the 1,680 or as well as it? Either way, this virus represents one in every twenty that have died this March.

I would caution of course that this virus seems to run exponentially so the 88 of March could be 20,000 in April, none of us knows for sure.  But when you deal in numbers, you take a snapshot in time, lay out the relevant numbers for the time frame and then compare and contrast. So looked at dispassionately for March, this virus is barely even a problem, (yet). The figures for the coming months just aren’t in yet.

The wider picture is confusing also. The overall Covid-19 death toll on the planet is hovering close to 40,000 I’ve read. The problem with that is that we cannot accurately say what the time period was. Could we take that as the number for March alone or do we consider it as 40,000 since the beginning of the year? For example, a source that follows and flags such world statistics has reported on the 25th of March 2020 that Covid-19 deaths stood at 21,297 on that day Mind you, on that very same day they report the deaths from seasonal flu stood at 113,034 and we know that the Corona Virus is a strain of the flu. If you want a really hard number to mull over then the same source reports 9,913,702 worldwide abortions during the same period. Dare I say it but no economies were shut down for those ten million unwanted babies.

But a flu virus is difficult to quantify because victims do not succumb to the flu. It is usually something else that kills, most often pneumonia. The logic though is that the patient/victim would not have got pneumonia if they had not had the flu. However, it makes categorising a cause of death problematic for both the medical team and the hospital. A patient diagnosed with the Corona Virus may have a heart condition and die of a heart attack. Do we attribute that to heart failure of the virus? Suddenly the numbers begin to look unreliable. And there are further variables such as the different natures of this virus. Some have it and don’t know because they have no symptoms, some have a cough and a runny nose and they just plough on and then there are the small minority who get the full blast, deep in the lungs and are in intensive care. It needs to be said that, so far, this is the same story every year with the seasonal flu and it hardly gets a mention.

To add to this confusion we are beginning to hear rumours of, “a second wave”. The story is that it arrived, we beat it, then we got back to normal living and “WHOOSH”, the damned thing came back with a vengeance. So we don’t know where it came from (China?), we are struggling to understand its composition, we’re working on a treatment/cure and we don’t know if it will come back again either. This is one that the numbers won’t nail until it’s all over and the tallies are done. But it is one thing to look at the virus itself and quite another to view the world reaction to it. China strictly quarantined while Sweden continues as if nearly normal. In Ireland, I believe that sensible precautions were taken early enough so that things may not get as bad as they could have been, but of course we’ll never know that for sure. However, the ‘safe not sorry’ principle was probably the best way to react.

But just as a virus kills, an economic depression kills also and we don’t want the cure to end being being worse than the disease. The western world has never so comprehensively shut down its economies like this before and the awkward question now looming in the shadows is, how long can it remain shut without dying completely. The jobless numbers have shot up but this is fine if it is temporary. Businesses are shut and this also is fine if they can re-open again soon. But how soon or more correctly, how long can we remain in shutdown without fatal damage being done to the world economy? There have been major wars for much less.

So I am balancing my worry about this virus with my equally valid worry about what happens after it, (because that time will come to). And I use the word balance advisedly because we need to balance our collective viral fears against our collective economic needs in the long run, bearing in mind that the landscape changes daily on both counts. Our current leader in his speech to the Nation referred to, “flattening the curve,” but if this is not done in a timely manner we may emerge from this virus into an economic contagion whose death toll could dwarf the Corona Virus of 2020.

There’s more to this than just medical concerns.

SNOWFLAKES? THIS IS A BLIZZARD

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A friend of mine qualified in such things, tells me that modern youth simply lack an ego strong enough to cope with reality. According to my scribe, kids today have their noses stuffed in other people’s lives and stupid games, all on electronic screens so the joy of watching a spider build a web, (ahem, off-line), or to see a cat stalking a bird in a tree, these things are either off-limits because they are too dangerous/dirty/pointless or the brats simply are not allowed outdoors unattended.

Let me not even mention getting milled in a football match, skinning a knee or coming home with a black eye. These kinds of rights of passage are a thing of the past. As a result our snowflakes are raised in cotton wool, they study the personalities of the people who’re famous in their tiny lives this week and then ape the speech and movements and slowly in their own sad heads, they become that vacuous person, warts and all because they can’t be persons themselves. They are the veneer of somebody else.

The problems arise when these kids are confronted in real life and they respond in the persona of somebody else, faux-American accent and all. A couple of fired questions later and it all breaks down leaving the juvenile exposed without any personality to defend themselves. Think of a body with no spine and you’re on the right track. The toughness each of us had in the past is consigned to that past and the modern version of kid is a defenseless mess in the real world.

So we shift to last Tuesday and the Irish Examiner reported two incidents of snowflake note. In the first, a 13-year-old schoolboy must have aggravated his school teacher enough that the man took action. He gripped the brat by the upper ear and followed this up four days later by placing his forearm against the brat’s chest pushing him backwards. It made me think back to my own school days at thirteen when the threat of a leather strap was ever present and a friendly slap across the face was seen as getting off lightly.

Not so in these snowflake times. The poor misfortunate teacher was hauled before the courts, grilled until well done and then served up on a plate for the brat’s parents edification. Even worse, the little shit of a boy and his equally helpless God-Love-Us parents were awarded €17,500 of taxpayers money by a half-wit Judge with fuck-all else to do that day. We really are losing the run of ourselves.

The forensics are interesting for the detail. The boy’s ear was held for ten-seconds and the push backwards lasted five-seconds. Looking at the award again, that comes to over a grand a second. But apparently, “In the aftermath of the first incident his right ear had become painful and discoloured at the point of contact by his teacher. He had also developed some back pain as a result of the second incident.” The red earlobe fine but the back business is just horse-shit.” However, the real meat for the prosecution was that, “Since the incidents, the lad had been fearful of meeting the teacher in his school grounds and had felt anxious while attending school. He had suffered pain, distress and discomfort.” What a load of codswallop! If I were the Judge that day I would have thrown up on the prosecuting council and struck the case off. But it gets better

The second reported incident in the paper earlier in the week was the case of an eight-year old brat flying back from Faro to Dublin, so that says Portuguese holidays right there. Anyway, the case revolved around a hot chocolate spillage on-board and the first question you would surely ask would be, “What sort of adult dick-head buys an eight-year old “HOT” chocolate on a plane?” They’d have been safer buying the kid a cold beer. It goes on, “Barrister Clare O’Shea, counsel for James, told the court the child had been scalded and suffered severe pain to his abdomen when the hot chocolate spilled onto his lap. She said James’s father had immediately pulled his son’s t-shirt off him. Ms O’Shea, who appeared with Dónal Johnston of Johnston Solicitors, said burns and blisters had begun to develop on James’s stomach. She said James’s father had alerted a member of the cabin crew as to what had happened and the child had been brought to the back of the plane for first aid.” So the plane jerks, the hot chocolate upends all over the kid and all hell breaks loose, fair enough.

If you know Ryanair cabin staff, such an incident would normally be seen as a commercial opportunity to sell the kid’s parents a refill, but I do them an injustice. “The court heard that James had anti-burn lotion applied to his stomach. Ms O’Shea said there had been no cold packs available and a cold bottle of sparkling wine had been used on James’s wounds to cool them down. A doctor on board had come to his assistance and administered a burns ointment. There had been no suitable pain medication in the aeroplane’s first-aid kit but that Calpol had been obtained from another passenger on board. On arrival to Dublin Airport, James had been taken to the Paediatric Emergency Department at Tallaght Hospital where some cold gel had been applied to his wounds.” All in all I would suggest that everything that could be done was done for the lad and the incident was just one of those things, an unfortunate accident.

When I was around that age I knocked over a kettle that had just boiled and it spilled on my arm and hand. Mt Mother grabbed me and ran freezing cold water over my arm and hand for about ten minutes until both went numb. Then I was packed off, (on my own), to school where doubtless some big prick punched or kicked that day for no reason. Not so the Ryanair, ahem, ‘victim’. Judge O’Donohoe, in his infinite wisdom, awarded the ‘victim’ twenty-five grand of taxpayers money for his pains so doubtless the boy can buy as much hot chocolate as his little snowflake heart desires. And don’t tell me the insurance companies will cover it because you and I cover the insurance companies, ten times over.

But money aside, how are kids today ever to become hardy enough to look after themselves? When will they find out that life is neither easy nor fair and to survive and prosper, you roll with the punches and build you own defenses? How can they possibly learn the basic skills if money is thrown at them if they as much as sneeze? God help us too if either the Russian or American army hits our shores in twenty years time with aggressive intentions because the only opposition I think they’ll encounter will be a battery of solicitors serving law-suits on them.

Sometimes I despair!

A TALE OF TWO JEREMYS

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I normally have little or no time for Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson is just an upper class twit. But this morning Jeremy Corbyn has called for the British government to abstain from escalating tensions with Iran without “credible evidence” that Tehran was responsible for attacks on two oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. Interestingly, there hasn’t been as much as a grunt from Boris.

Grainy black & white footage
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/15/corbyn-no-credible-evidence-of-iran-role-in-tanker-attacks
from person or persons unknown in the States shows a boat pull up to what appears to be, (the side of), a ship and unidentifiable blobby persons on board the boat appear to touch at something on the side of the ship. That something, we are being told, was an unexploded mine and the personnel on the boat, we are being told, are either Iranians, friends/allies of Iran or just plain terrorists inspired by Iran.

To start with, the people on the boat could just as easily be American, Israeli, Saudis or British special forces because all four nationalities are aggressively seeking war with Iran but they need an excuse to convince their own electorate. In any crime situation, the first things looked at are motivation and evidence. If this few seconds of video is the only evidence they have then it would be thrown out of any court of law as laughable. So what of the motivation for these attacks? There is no doubt that the Iranians have said publicly that if they are blocked from exporting their oil through the Straits/Gulf Region, then nobody will be allowed export a drop of their own products either. Washington is now squeezing Iranian oil exports so right there, you could argue, is the perfect Iranian motivation.

However, while Iran is willing to fight if they have to, they certainly are not actively seeking war with America, (who in their right mind would?) Verbal sabre-rattling aside, it would make no sense for Tehran to provoke the White House. Contrast that with John Bolton & Mike Pompeo’s persistent threats against Iran. There can be no doubt that both of these war-mongers are pushing for conflict all over the Middle-East and Iran is seen as one of the last countries there to be dismantled and sent back to the stone age. Add to that America’s long and disgraceful history of false flag operations as the lying justification to make war against anyone they dislike.

The British foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, described Corbyn’s comments as “pathetic and predictable”. The FCO had said: “No other state or non-state actor could plausibly have been responsible,” and pointed to a “recent precedent for attacks by Iran against oil tankers”. Those recent attacks they refer to amounted to unproven accusations which were uttered so often that they must now be accepted as facts by the voting public even without a shred of any credible evidence. This is precisely how false flag operations are run, (see “Gulf of Tonkin and the justification for the Vietnam War”). As to his observation that no other state or non-state actor could plausibly have been responsible, Israel would be the most obvious and capable culprit for just this sort of action. It would be hugely in Israel’s interests to see the Americans make war against Iran.

Jeremy Hunt further hit back at Corbyn over his comments, tweeting: “Pathetic and predictable. From Salisbury to the Middle East, why can he never bring himself to back British allies, British intelligence or British interests?” Hunt said Britain’s assessment “leads us to conclude that responsibility for the attacks almost certainly lies with Iran”. Might I suggest in response to Hunt that it could just be that Corbyn does not want the UK embroiled in yet another pointless war for the America’s sake. And on an aside, where is this so-called ‘assessment’ he refers to?

As a matter of interest, what is so pathetic and predictable about wanting peace? Does Hunt believe that it is the sole job of a foreign secretary to declare wars whenever possible. The modern day Western preoccupation with Iran began nearly seventy years ago when Mohammad Mosaddeq was democratically elected the 35th prime minister of Iran, holding office from 1951 until 1953. Mosaddeq looked at Iran’s assets and level of poverty and decided the western oil companies were ripping them off. So he nationalized the British ‘BP’. In response, London pleaded with Washington for help. The CIA were duly dispatched to overthrow Mosaddegh, which they quickly did and the “Shah of Iran” was imposed on the unruly Iranians. Decades of terror followed as the secret police of the Shah, (SAVAK) ran riot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAVAK
The imprisonments, routine torture and executions continued until the Iranian people rose up and chased the Shah out of the country, replacing him with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
https://www.biography.com/political-figure/ayatollah-ruhollah-khomeini
The American Embassy in Tehran was occupied and ransacked and hostages were taken and held for some time. President Carter ordered a rescue effort which failed miserably as two of the rescue helicopters crashed into each other over Iran. The Yanks have never forgiven the Iranians for wanting to democratically run their own country – odd that, isn’t it?

Finally, whoever planted the explosives of those tankers, did so with a view to stop them dead in the water. Why then would they return in broad daylight, knowing they could easily be spotted? Even worse, why would they return to retrieve an unexploded mine? One presumes the mine was placed and perhaps remotely detonated. But it’s obvious that it failed to explode, which would make it unstable and dangerous to attempt retrieval. Of course, this presumes it was an actual mine and not a box of chocolates or something equally innocuous.

So if you have a vote in the forthcoming British election, which Jeremy would get your vote?

WHAT IS THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY?

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The term “International Community” is one used frequently in the US, the UK, France, in all western media outlets and to a lesser extent, in the EU. It is supposed to convey a gravitas and a sense of unity of purpose and belief. I first heard this expression from George Bush senior around the time he was amassing an invasion force to drive the Iraqi’s out of Kuwait. He also referred to it as “The coalition of the willing.”

But when I think about it, it’s an empty term. There is no real International Community. There are Nation States, commercial power blocks and individual countries vying for a position in the modern world. What they all strive to do is to act in their own and their people’s interests. But Russia & China has come together this week in an unprecedented way to combine their awesome powers to act in their own interests, contrary to US power play and bullying. This combination of two super powers is the culmination of years of work between them.

My memory of the coalition of the willing is that the US bore 90% of the load at the time with various western countries very reluctantly sending small detachments of troops on the condition they would not be front line deployed or ever be in any kind of danger, (in a war!!). The UK was the exception to this even though a million UK citizens marched in London against any involvement in the war/s.

Far from being willing or in any kind of community, western nations are, and were, cajoled, brow-beaten, threatened and bullied into compliance to support America’s imperial dreams by using its military force to achieve its objectives. George W. Bush is a great example of this when he ominously announced on TV, “You are either with us or you are with the terrorists.” This was in relation to the invasion of Iraq and the true irony of that situation was that America itself was the terrorist by breaking international laws designed to avoid this very thing and breaking America’s own laws regarding such an engagement. But according to Bush, any nation that didn’t do likewise was a supporter of terrorism. So were those acts of terrorism by the coalition of the willing the true definition of an International Community?” Is an International Community just a respectable name for nations combining to terrorise others?

In the last twelve months, acting in unison, Russia and China have been very busy in the background selling American debt which both countries had been suckered into buying over the years. The monies paid to both for these debt documents was used by them to buy gold. They have done this in anticipation of the collapse of the American dollar with the inevitable implosion of that country’s economy as a result. It is now believed also that Putin took the decision five years ago that America wanted war with Russia and the US believed they could be successful as well. So for the last five years in utter secrecy, Russian scientists have worked furiously on families of new weapons and technologies, the most lethal of which is their line of hypersonic nuclear weapons. Fired from the back of hundreds of trucks hidden all across the vast country of Russia, these warheads can hit targets on mainland USA in four minutes. They are practically undetectable and even if detected, there is no time to react to them. The hypersonic line of new weapons really does bring the world back to ‘mutually assured destruction,” and perhaps we will all be much safer for it too.

The Chinese belt and road initiative is being strongly supported by the Kremlin as it is seen as an alternative to any trade with the West. It precludes the need for the West by reaching out to a market of five billion people in Asia and Africa and joining those many threads into a mutually beneficial trading block. They are working together on a new currency for this project and are shoring up hundreds of tons of gold to back the new currency, a return to the gold standard for their new money. China and Russia are using diplomacy and sharing technology to make friends around the globe even as the USA threatens to invade Venezuela and Iran to add to their list of victims.

The view from Beijing and Moscow sees a nation of 350m Americans attempting to impose itself on the six billion other people worldwide in what they term a unipolar world with American as its centre. The Russians and Chinese vision is of a multi-polar world with no centre and no leader. They see a peaceful world where war as a tool is consigned to history in favour of diplomacy, trade and negotiation.

Could this be the real International Community for the new age? After all of the empty rhetoric of the new century so far, is there finally a plan in place to create a true International Community for mankind?

As the Chinese proverb goes, “May you live in interesting times.”