US House of Representative Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has compared the mandate to wear masks in the House with German Jews being required to wear the Star of David during the Hitler era.
Taylor is a newly elected congresswoman and is a member of the Republican Party.
An outrageous comment from the US Congresswoman.
In an article in The Irish Catholic of May 13 Dr Philip Gonzales writes: “.... the response of the Irish Government to the Covid-19 crisis, although the most extreme in the EU, is part and parcel of a larger political shift in Western liberal democracies and their drift towards a new form of totalitarianism”.
The article quotes extensively from Carl Schmitt, a member of the Nazi Party. The article carries a picture of Schmitt at a microphone.
The article carries the headline ‘The Mass ban and the drift towards a new form of totalitarianism'.
Elsewhere in the article Gonzales, who lectures in philosophy in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, writes: “Who of us would have ever thought that in the 21st Century (sic) that we would be living in a country where it can be made a criminal offence at the stroke of a pen to receive the Eucharist, where to confess one’s sins out of sorrow and love is a crime, where it is forbidden to bury the dead, where a father is not allowed to be present at the birth of his child.”
An outrageous piece of writing.
According to a study carried at NUI Galway more than 95 per cent of working people in Ireland wish to continue with some form of remote employment after Covid-19 has been defeated.
One in 10 people has relocated because working from home gives them more options.
Ninety one per cent say that remote working gives them more flexibility, 86 per cent agree that remote working makes life easier and 68 per cent have seen their productivity increase.
The Thinking Anew column in The Irish Times today.
Be not the first by whom the new is tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
Lines from Alexander Pope, who was born in London on this day, May 21, 1688.
He was born to Catholic parents.
Pope's education was affected by laws enacted against Catholics. Catholics were not allowed teach, attend university or hold public office at the time.
They were barred from teaching, attending university and voting. They were also forbidden from holding public office on penalty of imprisonment.
Pope was taught to read by an aunt. He went to two Catholic schools in London. Such schools were illegal but were often tolerated in some places.
Retired Irish diplomat Philip McDonagh is the coauthor of On the Significance of Religion for Global Diplomacy.
A quote from the book:
"The taking of power to ourselves, in one form or another, is the root of the suffering of hundreds of millions of people.
"Diplomats must take human and cultural values seriously in foreign policy planning and peacebuilding.
"Only ‘the culture of encounter’ - one of Pope Francis’ favourite phrases - founded on the humility to listen can restore the resonance of great fundamental words: mercy, discernment, justice, trust and hope."
The number of ransomware attacks worldwide last year rose by more than 60 per cent to 305 million.
Approximately 24 gangs control the market, earning $18 billion in ransom money last year.
The Colonial Pipeline hack earlier this month, carried out by a Russian-based gang called DarkSide, according to experts could have been far more severe had US authorities not targeted the infrastructure of the hackers.
With few options for prosecution, it is expected the US government would wait to go aggressively after the perpetrators of the Colorado hack.
Someone familiar with the US government’s approach said: “It’s 10 or 15 young guys or girls who party a lot and want loads of money.
“You don’t go after them in Russia, you go after them when they go on vacation in Greece."
This week’s Mediahuis's Irish regional newspapers’ column. INM has been rebranded as Mediahuis.
Michael Commane
Russia is in the West’s bad books at present. In 2014 they annexed Crimea and they are playing a cat and mouse game with the territorial rights of Ukraine. In recent weeks they carried out large scale military manoeuvres on the Russia Ukraine border. The West saw the exercise as a serious provocation.
It is said they interfered in the US elections. They have been the number one suspect for cyber attacks on Western institutions.
And then there is Alexi Navalny, the Russian dissident and opposition leader. It is overwhelmingly accepted by experts in the West that it was Russian authorities who poisoned him with a Novichok nerve agent.
And he too has accused Russia’s President Vladimir Putin for attempting to poison him. Navalny was flown to Berlin’s Charité Hospital last August where he recovered from the attempt on his life. He returned to Russia in January. He is now serving a two and a half year sentence in a corrective labour colony on the outskirts of Pokrov, which is approximately 100 kilometres east of Moscow.
The Russian authorities say he is a criminal and a terrorist. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Navalny’s human rights have been violated.
The West says one thing, the Russians another.
When the Iron Curtain fell and the Soviet Union collapsed there was great hope for detente between East and West.
What happened? Did we in the West patronise Mother Russia? Was it a good idea that Nato should expand so far east as Poland? How responsible is the West for creating an atmosphere that made it so easy for Vladimir Putin to become President of the Russian Federation? Did the West antagonise or belittle the Russian people?
Have we in the West ever appreciated what the Soviet Union did to save the world from the terror of Germany. We can easily use the term Nazis but that distracts us from the fact that it was the German State that caused 27 million Soviet citizens to lose their lives in World War II.
On Sunday, May 9 Russia celebrated its victory in what they call the Great Patriotic War.
But for what happened on the River Volga in 1942/’43 Americans might well have been forced to nuke Germany into submission. The victory at Stalingrad, now called Volgograd, was the significant turning point in the war.
When I was in school we heard little or nothing about the role Russia played in defeating Germany in the 1939 - 1945 war.
May is a hallowed month for Mother Russia. It was on May 8, 1945 that the Red Army’s Marshal Georgy Zhukov countersigned the unconditional surrender of Germany in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst.
It’s vital that people of good will from East and West will sit down, appreciate each other and work for peace. It is too simplistic to say all right resides with us in the West and Russia personifies evil. Mr Biden, Mr Putin, please sit down and talk to each other in trust and respect.
Across the European Union the number of marriages is decreasing, while numbers divorcing is increasing.
The marriage rate in the European Union has fallen from eight per 1,000 in 1964 to 4.3 in 2019, wheres the divorce rate over the same period has increased from 0.8 per 1,000 to 1.8 per 1,000.
In Ireland there were 4.1 marriages per 1,000 people in 2019, 3.5 in France, 5.0 in Germany, 7.0 in Lithuania.
In the same year in Ireland there were o.7 divorces per 1,000 people, in Latvia it was 3.1, Germany 1.8, France 1.9.
Independent News & Media has rebranded, now calling itself Mediahuis.
Yesterday the company’s Irish publisher, Peter Vandermeersch was interviewed on RTE Radio 1’s Business programme.
He said that it was important for the company to be honest and fair with its employees.
“Let’s communicate in a way that is open, let’s do what we say and say what we do.”
He commented on how when they bought the paper the culture was sick.
“We are not working for a dinosaur that will die but for a future.
It made for great radio and well worth listening to the interview in full, which is available on the RTE website.
On this day, May 15, 1940 Richard and Maurice McDonald opened the first McDonald’s restaurant.
Today there are over 39,000 McDonald restaurants in 119 markets.
On this day, May 8, 1988 the Soviet Army began to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. It meant 115,000 troops were on their way back to the Soviet Union.
It is said one of the reasons for their defeat in Afghanistan was because of the central command system within the army. All operational activities had to be sanctioned by remote commanders often far away from the theatre of war.
In the guerrilla warfare waged by the Afghans they would have attacked and caused damage and multiple casualties before the Soviet troops on the ground were given permission for a counter offensive.
The next time you buy something from Amazon bear in mind that in 2020 their total sales income in Europe was €44 billion.
According to tax filing in Luxembourg the company paid nil corporation tax.
How many Amazon parcels were delivered on your road yesterday.
Next time you are buying a book, why not check the website of a nearby bookshop and buy local.
In The Irish Times of Tuesday, columnist Finan O’Toole challenged sacked Sunday Independent columnist Eoghan Harris on his anonymous social media account. The piece was titled ‘For newspaper columnists, anonymity is a betrayal'.
Indeed, anonymity is always a betrayal, a disservice to truth.
O’Toole finishes his piece writing:
"The resurgence, through social media, of anonymity as a primary mode of public discourse is corrosive of both personal decency and democratic debate. It breeds millions of Sneerwells and Snakes. [He refers earlier to the characters in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal].
"But it is also, paradoxically, a backhanded compliment to the power of one’s own name. Trolls don’t put their names to bad stuff because they want to keep them free of the taint of the gutless spite. They know anonymity is a form of shame. Journalists should be at least as careful of their own good names.
This week’s Independent News & Media Irish regional newspapers' column
This was broadcast yesterday on WDR (West German Radio).
Westdeutscher Rundfunk or West German Broadcasting, is a public broadcasting organisation based in Cologne in the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
"Blessings in spite of the Vatican's ban: At first it was just words, now action follows:
Today and in the next few days, Catholic priests across Germany want to bless all loving couples - whether gay, lesbian or straight. And that, in spite of the fact that the Vatican only recently clearly banned any such blessings.
In the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, blessings are planned today in a number of places, including Aachen, Hattingen and Cologne.
Under the motto #liebegewinnt, (lovewins) church services are registered all over Germany around the main day of action on May 10, which is one week before the International Day Against Homophobia. “
International Day Against Homophobia is Monday, May 17.
According to the most recent polls German Green Party c0-leader Annalena Baerbock has overtaken Angela Merkel’s CDU Party ahead of Federal elections in Germany in September.
Baerbock was born in 1980 and grew up on a farm near Hanover, the capital of Lower Saxony.
She speaks fluent English. She studied political science and law at Hamburg University and did a Masters in International Law at the London School of Economics.
Baerbock joined the Green Party in 2005. In 2013 she became a member of the Bundestag - German Parliament, representing Brandenburg.
The German Instrument of Surrender, the definitive text ending World War II and the defeat of Germany was signed in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst on May 8, 1945 at 21.20 local Berlin time.
There were three language versions of the surrender document – Russian, English and German – with the Russian and English versions proclaimed, in the text itself, as the only authoritative ones.
ACT OF MILITARY SURRENDER
The Irish Times yesterday carried a report on Michel Barnier’s The Great Illusion: a secret Brexit diary (2016 - 2020).
The 500-page diary was published in French yesterday and an English version of the book will be available in October.
Throughout the book Barnier expressed his bewilderment with the British approach to the talks.
He talks about Dominic Raab as having ‘a messianic glint in his eye’.
He sees Theresa May as a courageous woman surrounded by men putting their own interests before those of their country.
Barnier did not trust David Frost, the British negotiator, nor did he admire his negotiating skills.
Indeed, he told the British negotiators that their technique was a farce.
He admitted that Johnon’s indifference to the truth complicated the negotiations.
Barnier describes Leo Varadker as ‘courageous’ and praises him for the role he took in the abortion rights referendum.
The book is published by Gallimard.
It is “not OK and not healthy” that some supermarkets are currently selling alcohol “cheaper than they are selling water”, according to the Minister for Health.
Stephen Donnelly insisted minimum unit pricing for alcohol is being introduced “because there is powerful evidence this works”.
Speaking at the official launch of the policy in Dublin on Tuesday, Mr Donnelly said there is alcohol-related mortality of more than 1,000 people a year, while international analysis estimated there were 2,700 deaths attributable to alcohol in Ireland in 2016.
He said the number of hospitalisations wholly attributable to alcohol doubled between 1995 and 2018.
This has been doing the rounds as a meme on WhatsApp. It’s good fun, interesting too.
Note the words below. Initially, you will have difficulty reading them. However, gradually your brain will interpret the words correctly. Please give a chance for these words to speak to your brain.
Here we go!
7H15 M3554G3
53RV35 7O PR0V3
H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N
D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5!
1MPR3551V3 7H1NG5!
1N 7H3 B3G1NN1NG
17 WA5 H4RD BU7
N0W, 0N 7H15 LIN3
Y0UR M1ND 1S
R34D1NG 17 4U70M471C4LLY
W17H0U7 3V3N
7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17,
B3 PROUD! 0NLY
C3R741N P30PL3 C4N
R3AD 7H15!
PL3453 F0RW4RD 1F
U C4N R34D 7H15
This is a very good example of a brain study: If you can read this, your mind is still young and has no Parkinson, congrats!
Lovely brain teaser.
Try reading it over meaningfully. You will really enjoy...
This week’s Independent News & Media Irish regional newspapers’ column.
There has been a significant backlog in issuing passports.
In mid-April there was a backlog of 92,000 but by Thursday of last week that number had been reduced to 89,000.
According to media reports 44,000 of the applications in the backlog were from people living in the Republic of Ireland.
Covid is a significant contributing factor to the backlog. Brexit too is not helping.
But why right now would anyone want a passport?
Today is World Press Freedom Day.
Two thirds of prisoners in English jails were expelled from school.
According to an 1997 study 77 per cent of prisoners never sat a public examination, 80 per cent left school before the age of 16, 71 per cent were users of hard drugs, 81 per cent never married and 72 per cent had fathered children.
On this day, May 1, 1945 a
That same day a soldier of the victorious Red Army raises the Soviet flag over that same Reich Chancellery.
The world could breathe again. The job was done.
RTÉ Radio is announcing these days that it is carrying out technical work at its Three Rock transmitter and is advising people in the Dublin area served by Three Rock that there will be interruption to service and they should retune into the Kippure transmitter.
On April 1 RTÉ discontinued broadcasting on its DAB system.
This month German radio magazine Das Magazin has an editorial on the move over to DAB+. It points out how slow the changeover from FM to DAB is taking and says that all cars since the end of 2020 must be fitted with DAB radios.
What exactly is RTÉ doing by closing down its DAB transmission, which has been available for a number of years in the Dublin, Cork and Limerick areas?
And there has been little or no news coverage on this topic.
Last evening ARD, German television showed a wonderful film about a group of young people, tired and disappointed with life in the former GDR.
The protest began with an environmental aspect, with the young people objecting to the solution in the rive Pleise in Leipzig. They met in a Protestant church in the city. At first the minister objected to their political overtures.
They were all young, some of them still in school. Some went to jail on trumped up charges.
In the end their enthusiasm, their idealism, their youthfulness won out and defeated an old worn-out establishment that had nothing more, nothing new to offer the people.
Watching it, it was impossible not to think in sadness of the state of churches today in Ireland.
This is a startling reality.
People living in high- and upper middle-income countries represent 83 percent of all those who have received Covid vaccination.
A mere 0.2 per cent of Covid vaccines have been administered in low-income countries.
This week’s Independent News & Media Irish regional newspapers’ column.
There was a fire in an Iraqi hospital at the weekend, which caters for Covid patients.
At least 29 people were killed in the fire.
The Indian hospital system is unable to cope with the current Covid surge.
And the Indian story is being replicated in other countries around the world.
Has it dawned on any of us the billions we spend on weapons of destruction?
The money that has been wasted on weaponry in Iraq is a scandal. India is a world nuclear power.
Across the world we see pictures every evening of old, outdated dirty hospital equipment.
Isn’t it time the world made a decision to spend money on keeping people alive, and keeping them alive in a manner in keeping with human dignity, rather than keeping them in poverty and killing them.
Global spending on weapons reached record levels last year despite the economic ravages of the coronavirus with China, where the pandemic began, leading the arms race in Asia by a considerable margin.
Research carried out by The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) shows that the amount spent on defence globally went up to €1.48 trillion, a rise of almost four per cent in real terms over 2019.
