Ballymun GAMA Workers

Haven't much time to blog right now, GAMA workers in Ballymun deserve any support available. Social visits may help raise their spirits. Be back as soon as time is available!

Hard Work - This Blogging

WOW! Today was just one of those days. Selective as I am, there were still 16 various items in todays news that I could enjoy commenting on but, what the hell,I'm on invalidity pension and supposed to be taking things easy!
Ah well, maybe things will be dull for the next few days and allow me time to get around to all 16 of them.
The most curious among them, to me, was the case of Womens Aid "playing the game" in praising Ireland -
"According to statistics from Women's Aid, one in five women in Ireland were subjected to abuse - either emotional, verbal, physical or sexual. This compares with one in four subjected to the same abuses in the rest of Europe and in the US."

This looks to me more like the "begging nuns" approach to pleading for funding, rather than any unambiguous assertion that it's time to demand that the Irish grow up and admit that any abuse within the family should be declared un-acceptable.
Personally, I have always thought that Womens Aid is somewhat un-professional and occasionally allows an anti-male attitude be reflected from within their ranks.
But then, I'm a cynic, aren't I?
Let's be honest, in this country the easiest access to funding is still through a parochial or parochial-type network, regardless of the empty-pew syndrome most parishes are suffering from.
Add to that the majority Catholic culture's negative tendency to expect passivity and obedience within it's ranks, especially from women.
Nuns, whether plain-clothes or in full military uniform, may be well trained in running a business, but will remain primarily enslaved to the Vatican in any of their seemingly secular operations, and always be grovellers in secular society.
Religious orders of nuns infiltrated suburban communities in the 80's to find more contemporary ways of adding to the coffers of the Vatican, fooling many of the less-educated into considering them to be "socialists", how are you!

The Catholic Church has an obvious vested interest in perpetuating the need for charities. Anything else that looks like a reliable means of filching state funding is equally attractive to them. Expecting that professional Catholics will ever show any commitment to help solving negative social conditions for an increasingly secular world is unrealistic. In too many cases, they themselves are a perpetuating factor!
Isn't it time that our politicians came clean and declared openly whether their primary commitment is to the real world (secular), or to the failed aspiration of a Catholic State for A Catholic Nation?
In the meantime, supporters of Womens Aid can always console themselves by offering up loads of prayers for women victims in Holy Ireland!

CHARITIES AND CHANCERS

I recently signed up to support a child-sponsorship charity. Considering my opinion on charities in our overtly corrupt society, if this should come as a surprise to those who know me, in fairness to them, their surprise wouldn’t surprise me in the least!

However, it all happened quite normally under my present circumstances. I just happened to be in the city-centre to purchase a small spare stock of printer-ink cartridges. I could also have gone on a small shopping-spree, but didn’t. The sole reason for not doing so was – I could think of nothing that I actually needed.
Having just reached that conclusion, and making my way back to the Ballymun bus-stop, a young black man politely enquired if I had ever considered supporting a child-sponsorship charity!

I went through my usual soap-box explanations for not trusting charities, most of which he understood, some of which surprised him, but his personality and obvious trust in the charity he was employed by eventually won me over.

An important factor involved was that the charity seems to be starting up in Ireland from an English base, Had it been Irish-based, it simply wouldn’t have had the least prospect of satisfying me. For me, the simple reality of the majority culture in Ireland being Catholic would have ruled out any question of my supporting it. It’s as simple as that!

Charities are businesses with special privileges relating to secrecy. They were a plaything and conscience-salver for the rich, but could also be a source of large profits for those in control of them.

The world today is probably experiencing constant growth in the formation of new charities, rather than their being phased out by intelligent forward-planning on the part of secular (real-world) politicians. This simply is NOT GOOD ENOUGH!

A charity can only be justified if clearly based on a temporary structure. It’s object must be to enlighten the secular world and it’s elected representatives of the best means of drawing society’s needs into a politically recognised pattern of forward planning and budgeting for, in other words – taxation, thereby phasing out the need for the charitiy’s continued existence i.e. IT’S SUCCESS!

Advanced economies perpetuating the need for charities as a subtle means of continuing to exploit poorer countries is becoming more blatantly obvious. Charities becoming a legitimate source of increased employment, while shrouding the large executive salaries and perks for those in control of them in secrecy and privilege, is nothing but hypocrisy, if not downright fraud!

As I see it, some secular forces aspire to slowly drawing the human race out of a past in which life was cheap and largely dictated by ignorant bullies and thieves. Other forces aspire to preserving those conditions, and bleat about a “liberal agenda” and globalisation.
I proudly support liberalisation through globalisation, the human condition is far too important to be left in the charge of those who have always criticised science and undermined secular, political attempts to create meaningful democratic structures.

No Chance Of A Brave New World?

Jews criticise Germany's first Holocaust memorial
*************************************************
Humanitarian attempts to face the real challenges of modern society, such as starvation, AIDS, tsunamis etc. etc. are not greatly assisted by attempts to maintain victim cultures based on the chauvinistic claims of old-time-religion. These very victim-cultures are in themselves huge contributing factors to the seemingly increasing suicidal depression amongst the better-off nations in the world.
World religions which cannot lift themselves above these chauvinistic claims cannot continue to command respect, and indeed, are losing the respect they held in times gone by.
Endless bickering between the various religious sects has taken a very heavy toll on the citizens of this small planet, to the extent that it is no longer possible to reasonably extol the virtues of of a HUMAN RACE!
Technology has brought about a greater awareness of the blundering incompetence of the "civilised world". World diplomacy can now be seen to rest merely on the underlying threat that "my gang is bigger than your gang, and if you don't do what we want, we'll kill you". National or racial mafias are now global!
Religious gurus, in all their pomp and glory, gain sustenance from this human condition, and methodically play secular groups off, one against the other. This is so blatantly obvious that better educated people are now finding it more difficult to live in a state of Christian denial, Catholic denial, Jewish denial, etc. etc.

The inadequacies of old Roman Imperialism as a model for modern society should be quite easy to admit to, so where's the problem?

It should be quite commonplace now to hear people proudly giving priority to the simple fact that we are all human, regardless of which time-space culture or ideology we were born into. Why isn't it so common-place?
Because THEY won't let us? Who are THEY?
A disgusting murder in Northern Ireland has to be brought to the world stage of the European Parliament because the Irish majority culture cannot or won't deal with it themselves. What does that say for the Irish majority culture?
Victim cultures based on chauvinistic religions are not a way forward!

That Liberal Agenda!

Reports this morning said Cura could lose out on €600,000 in funding from the State's Crisis Pregnancy Agency if it failed to give its clients details about other organisations.
*******************
So now I can see what Irish Catholics are on about when they use the term "liberal agenda" like the foulest of epithets! It's only a Catholic thing, after all.
Liberal Catholics just want to go for the money! From a business point of view, if there's Irish taxpayers money to be had, why not go for it? It seems to me that it's always been like that in the past, so I really can't understand why it should cause a fuss now. What really is going on between these Catholics? Could it be that many of the older generations thought that their Church was about something other than hard-headed business deals?
Such convictions might have been excuseable 20 years ago, but surely there's been sufficient exposures in the meantime to have educated even the most reluctant, slowest learners?
Ah, well, as long as it's only a Catholic thing, there's nothing much normal people can do about it!

Pearls Of Wisdom To Ignorant Swine

CORI, the umbrella group for Catholic religious institutions, the Conference of Religious in Ireland, has said it does not believe the country's infrastructure and social provisions can be brought up to average European levels without an increase in taxes.
In its latest socio-economic review, CORI says that despite all its economic success, Ireland still has growing levels of poverty, unequal income distribution and social exclusion.
The review says 900,000 people here are living at risk of poverty and claims the last seven budgets have widened the income gap between rich and poor.
*************************************

And the national media shows due deference to Fr Sean Healy!
For a fairer balance, I think it important to point out that CORI comes from the same stable as the Irish Christian Brothers.
Nor does their refernce to the need for extra taxes require any profound level of intelligence! It would be difficult to discount the expertise of CORI in this field, as they have always been, and still are, such a major contributing factor to Ireland's problem of economic inequality, and many other national problems as well. The latest budding scandal caused by the Irish Christian Brothers has yet to unravel, but the reluctance of the nation's administration to run the country in any pro-active manner, nor to give meaning to such wonderful words as transparency and open-ness would be obvious to a deaf-mute.
The serious problem with Ireland today is that probably 95% of resources are being squandered in attempting to conceal Catholic Ireland's dismal failure, while the many businesses channelling funds into Vatican bank accounts goes on unabated.
CORI is in a very smug position, pretending it gives a damn. It's loyalties are to Roman Imperialism, old-time-religion being merely a front for the vast financial corporation run from the Vatican in the name charity!
The very idea that politicians might begin as idealists, naievely thinking they might make a difference, and working hard for years to get elected, is beneath their contempt! The secular world running it's own affairs, efficiently and openly, is of no benefit to CORI. They can always box-clever and waffle about their Rolls-Royce solutions to national social problems. They haven't played a very impressive role as national leaders over the past 15 years, though.
One thing is sure, time will tell just what the hell sort of Republic Bertie ran!

A Haven From Heaven 2

After 2 weeks of further waiting for the people supposedly running this country to give us some clue as to what their plans are, they are obviously still waiting for a sign from above, or something! One could be forgiven for thinking that Bertie, the eternal wobbler, has a secret blood-brother relationship with Adams and McGuinness, and intends to utilise the silly season to pull some chestnuts out of the fire for them. Is he actually sniggering behind the backs of his 2 PD colleagues? Just think, one in Health, the other in Justice! What electoral support will they have coming into the next election? Probably less than David Trimble!
The only people down south with any bottle are the criminals and the Irish Christian Brothers (is there any difference between them?). What sort of scam were the "Brudders" planning? They will probably get away with plundering the country on account of their large bills for child abuse. But the popular claim by most Irish Catholics that the Church has no say in anything nowadays doesn't sit quite so comfortable right now, does it?
The Gardai playing the same over-charging game as the Banks is hardly any surprise, either.
Irish business people involved in the huge fraud of Turkish construction workers may yet prove very embarrassing for Ireland's glorious trade union movement! (as well as Mary Harney).
The dreaded Brits, warts and all, tend to do a better job. Thir election result was exactly what the doctor ordered. But the Brits have been suffering under their own a lot longer, which might account for their astuteness.
Irish Catholics down south simply refuse to accept that they are suffering under their own!
There's probably about two dozen or so more good scandals being held back by the editors of our investigative journalists to be drip-fed to us over the coming months if they cannot be successfully covered-up or settled "out-of-court". In politics, everything is timing, and it will be very interesting to sit back and observe the nature of these scandals, and of course, ponder why the public have been kept in the dark about them for so long. Who knows, maybe Bertie will even get up the bottle himself to back his PD Minister for Justice, and maybe tell our Gardai to get their act together and start earning their salaries, for a change. The second elite force that needs to be told to get it's act together is the Prison Officers. All too often the inmates in our prisons are not the real criminals.
But we do live in very interesting times.