text:
… Don't I have enough problems in my life as it is?
August 22, 2018 September 1, 2018 WolflanderLeave a comment
I remember one particular incident from my childhood that has left an indelible mark on my awareness. In 5th class in National School (i.e., Primary School) in the harbour town of Cobh (formerly Queenstown) on the South coast of Ireland, I was at the age when young Catholic boys and girls were prepared for the religious rite of passage known as "Confirmation". This meant, according to the Church, that we were now of an age to be classified as "strong and perfect Christians", ready to take responsibility for our own lives. It also meant that we had to face an examination on religious doctrine based upon our knowledge of the little book called the "Catechism". It cost about three pence and was the cheapest and smallest book on our prescribed list of school books. In this Age of Austerity and Financial Chaos, three pence was the price of a small bag of toffee sweets. In today's parlance we would say it was "as cheap as a fiddler's fart", meaning that it was noticeable but commonplace.
The Catechism was divided into two parts. The first part occupied the initial third of the booklet and was in the format of Questions and Answers on essential religious topics; essential, that is, in the post-War years of the late 1940s/early 1950s. It was printed in scary bold print and, as far as my memory now goes back over 78 years, it dealt with such basic questions as:
Q. "Who made the world?"
A. "God"
Q. "List the Ten Commandments"
A. …. and so on.
I must admit now, to my eternal shame, that I have forgotten the First Commandment. That is because we learned all those things by rote in those days. That meant, one had to take a deep breath and list them mindlessly and at speed. Nevertheless, you will probably have already got the gist of the level of theological knowledge required of those of us desirous to be "strong and faithful Christians". The boldly printed Qs and As represented 99% of the content of our half-hour religious instruction classes.
The other two-thirds of the Catechism was printed in faded grey, visually unthreatening, print. It followed the same format as the first one-third but the Questions were longer and so were the Answers. This part occupied 1% of class time during the year. And as we had learned in our Mathematics classes, numbers like 99.74 could sensibly be rounded up to 100% and welcomed with a satisfied release of breath because nobody with any sense would notice the difference anyway. Essentially it meant that it was required to justify the printing of the Catechism and charging thruppence, but could safely be ignored. Ignored, that is, by 99.99% of the indocrinees. [Editor's note: "Is there such a word as "indoctrinee" and if so, what does it mean? My reply: "I know what it means to me and 99.999% of my readers will know instinctively what it means"]. And, as I was saying, it could be ignored by 99.99% … but not by me. Perhaps I wasn't properly potty-trained in those baby years, and taught the essential rule in life, that is, to know when enough is enough, or else, to learn "to shit or get off the pot". Wherever the instinct came from, I always wanted to know What and Why and When and How and Where and Who. And so, I read the entire Catechism from beginning to end. I was prepared for the Great Day!
The Great Day arrived and all the boys (we were a "boys only" school, but I shall return to that traumatic experience later, don't worry) in my class and those from Sixth Class were rounded up and marched into Mr. Sullivan's classroom which was the only room big enough to accommodate all those little boys, plus the teachers of those classes, plus the Bishop, the Parish Priest, the local Canon, the Diocesan Administrator,and one or two other priestly supporters. We were arraigned, standing stiffly upright, along three walls of the classroom, whilst the Bishop, an elderly cleric who wore a formal black coat, with black trousers, gaiters and buttoned-up boots, a formal purple shirt, and a big signet ring which townspeople kissed when they bobbed courteously on meeting His Lordship on his daily trip from the Bishop's Palace to St Colman's Cathedral and back again. You see, we in Cobh Boys National School were privileged to live in the town which was the epicentre of the Diocese of Cloyne. I was never sure why the centre of the Diocese of Cloyne was located in Cobh and not in the village of Cloyne on the Eastern end of Cork Harbour. But more about that later if I find an explanation.
After a few words of grovelling welcome from the School Principal the Bishop started with the first boy on his left and asked a question chosen randomly from the Catechism. The boy answered with the word-perfect answer from the first third of the Catechism. A slightly perceptible communal release of breath and communal tension could be felt. We were off to a flying start. Teachers' faces allowed a slight sign of relief.; a slight nod of heads to one another suggested perhaps more than relief was felt. With a plodding determination the Bishop moved on, each boy answered with almost military precision. The authority figures around His Lordships chair and small table relaxed and even smiled with approbation. I was standing in the corner of the back of the class on the left, so I could not see those answering before it came to my turn. As it did. A slight quickening of the pulse, increased focus on the sequence of the content of the questions, a little lick of the lips and three long, deep breaths and exhalation, a trick taught to me by my mother who was a singer, contralto with the local Gilbert and Sullivan and light opera groups in Cobh; she assured me that it worked every time for her as she waited in the wings to make her entrance on stage. I was as relaxed as I could be and prepared. The bishop looked up from his list of boys, and stern-faced, ask me my question. I couldn't believe my luck! God and the heavenly hosts of Angels, Archangels, Saints, Martyrs (both male and female) were smiling on me. I felt and dimly perceived the Cone of Heavenly light shining on me. The question he asked wasn't exactly straight out of the grey, forgotten two-thirds of the Catechism but I saw the connection and I answered with confidence.
"Wrong answer", said the Bishop; and turned his attention to the next boy. It was then I heard The Voice saying: "I'm sorry, my Lord, but I think I am right".
I have heard a recording of the Golden Gate Quartet, sing "Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho, Jericho, and them Walls came a-tumblin' down". I realised immediately that The Voice was actually My Voice. In the shocked silence that followed I almost expected the school walls to tumble down. But no, they didn't. I suppose you will have noticed at certain times in your own life, that Time, our perceived time, seems to speed up and at other times it slows down. Like in a dream when you run for your life through a bog that holds your feet in its grasp and everything is in slow motion, Or as in Shaolin meditation where you meditate to the regular beat of a brick being tapped with a wooden mallet. By focusing on the "click … click … click …" of the beat, the mind goes into meditative contemplation of the Cosmic Oneness and Time stands still as the meditator enters into the sublime Cosmic Oneness. Modesty stops me making such cosmic comparisons in that instance. But everything stood still and then in slow motion I remember the assembled aides and supporters gathering in a huddle around the Bishop. And I didn't pee or shit myself with fright either!
His entourage relaxed a little and dispersed to their positions in the tableau. The Bishop removed his spectacles and fixing his rheumy eyes unblinkingly on me. he said: "You didn't speak loudly enough, boy, so I misheard what you said. You should learn to speak up. Next boy, please." Have you noticed in your own life, that those in authority rarely, if ever, apologise but always imply that their mistake was your fault?
A banner with the strange device, Excelsior
The experience has burned a banner with a strange device into my conscious awareness. It has become my mantra over the years. It has bolstered my confidence in difficult times and re-assured me with its consolation when everything around me has been falling apart. The flaming letters of the mantra spell out "QUESTION AUTHORITY". It is the underlying principle of free humans, it is the foundation stone of democracy, and my goodness, does it screw up the plans and tilt the table when those same authorities are imposing their will. If nothing else, it signals to would-be dictators that it's time to shit or get off the pot.
Posted in bloggingfundamentals, Community, Democracy, Growing up, Humour, Ireland, irishtimes, journal.ie, Uncategorized
Our best option then is to block the Government's control of our lives by planned citizen actions of non-compliance with their rules while still remaining within the law.
When the Pope visits Ireland on Saturday 25 August next, he will make a private visit to the Capuchin Day Centre in Dublin for about 2 hours. And then he and his entourage will move to Croke Park to attend the "Feast of Families".
I am extremely disturbed by the news that "the authorities" in Dublin are making contingency plans to "hide" (my words) the homeless families, homeless children, distressed and disturbed adults and children who sleep on the streets, by forcibly removing them outside the Pale overnight. Or maybe the homeless and dispossessed will conspire albeit unwillingly with their oppressors and go without a murmur. I am even more dismayed and disturbed by the comparative silence of the Irish public on hearing this news.
What message is this behaviour sending to the spirits of the children who were born in the captivity of Mother and Baby "homes" and buried secretly in holes in the ground or dumped in cesspits? What message is this sending to those who have lived their lives with the mark of evil stamped on them and on their human spirit, and on their families by successive governments who didn't show care, or understanding or forgiveness for fear that it might undermine the unholy alliance of Church and State in buggering and bastardising the poor and innocent? What message does the behaviour of our, yes, OUR Government, send out to people of this country, and to the world at large about our priorities?
Is our Government and our entire Dáil and Seanad and the entire apparatus of State bereft of authority and power and ability to take action, or are they afraid of what might happen to them at the hands of international global capitalism and the eroded democracies of Europe if they were to wake up to their responsibilities to the people and do something? Are the Irish people themselves so dumbed down and silenced that we can turn a blind eye, and a deaf ear, to the pain of fellow citizens, both old and new? What are we afraid of? Why don't we speak up as a people and say "Stop! Enough! We will have no more of this!" Or are we just afraid of fear itself and how it might upset our cosy yet impoverished lives! We seem to settle for blind rage and name calling and verbal violence on the social media to give us an escape from taking real action to make changes. Vain dreams and foolish waking!
Sun Tzu, in "The Art of War", the most important and most famous military treatise from China for the last two thousand years, wrote: "Plan for what is difficult while it is still easy, do what is great while it is still small". We have now gone beyond the stage where our problems were easy (oh! if only we had had the wit to tackle them then) or small (because then we had the money to tackle them and plan for the future). But Sun Tzu had further advice that we might now heed, even at this stage: "Thus the highest form of generalship is to frustrate and block the enemy's plans; the next best is to prevent the coming together of the enemy's forces; the next in order is to attack the enemy's army in the field; and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.
Let's translate that from the military, agressive language into advice for peaceful citizen action. The best option for us now is to frustrate the Governments plans where they undermine us as citizens of an independent country; the next best option is to block them where possible from combining with other governments and institutions to undermine our rights as citizens; the next is to respond violently with protests and demonstrations; and the worst option of all is to try to unseat them from their positions of power in the State. We have seen where the "Water protests" got with all their good intentions. Nowhere. We have participated as individuals and in groups in street protests and action groups against homelessness, against incompetence and abuse of power in the health system. Our educational system no longer prepares our young people for meaningful work in society, but instead schools them by rote in the regurgitation of "approved" responses to problems without ever understanding the nature of the problem. Our best option then is to block the Government's control of our lives by planned citizen actions of non-compliance with their rules while still remaining within the law.
The simplest way of starting on this path is to QUESTION AUTHORITY! For instance, in regard to the Pope's visit, by all means greet him if you feel you owe allegiance to what he represents. Otherwise, go about your own business and ignore the visit. If the Dublin authorities decide to hide the obscenity of homelessness, one option is, for those who object, to allow those who are taken out of sight to be accommodated safely overnight elsewhere, but perhaps they could be replaced on the streets at night by stand-in or even "sleep out" replacements. While the public representatives go about their self-styled business of colluding with the niceties of so-called "civilised societies" no one is forced to come out and cheer. There are lots of ways to starve those in power by gradually withdrawing our authority from them because, and don't forget this, it was we who democratically elected them and gave them that authority in the first place. Let's see how they fare without our complicity in their self-aggrandizement. Remember the words of James Connolly from a century ago: "The great seem great because we are on our knees. Let us arise." Meanwhile, we need to start planning now how we are going to rescue our society before homo sapiens becomes yet another branch of humanity to be lost in the process of evolution.
Posted in bloggingfundamentals, Change, Community, Democracy, Democratic structures, Europe, Evolutionary Activism, Homelessness, Ireland, irishtimes, journal.ie, Life and Death, Politics, Taoism
As you know, we all have our own little ways of making a house a home and I assumed that worms operating in a different sphere to me would most likely prefer to do it their way.
August 3, 2018 September 1, 2018 WolflanderLeave a comment
Today is another positive step in my efforts to develop a sustainable, independent way of life and living? "So what?" you may well chorus. Indeed so. But I am now equipped with a compost heap (five in fact!), a warm and healthy wormery, and the crowning jewel, or jewels rather, two Bokashi Buckets. This means that from now on, I have no need to waste money on refuse collection services and no corresponding "opportunity" to finance the State or Local Authority for collecting my (and your) waste to compost it centrally and then to sell the compost back to me to feed my garden. My next target is (hopefully) to get a few SEAI grants to insulate my cottage and conserve heat, to add solar panels to provide free electricity and then finally to go off-grid. Freedom and Fun!
It has to be admitted though that it has also been a painful learning experience. I have a confession to make. I have been using a wormery for a few years now and gradually learning how make effective use of it. Unfortunately, the wormery developed a crack in the base just where one of the legs joins the bottom "floor" and started to leak the fluid which is a very valuable bye-product and plant food. I stopped using it and bought another wormery … as I thought.
My Silver Palace Wormery
This was a metal construction, very sturdy and impressive. It was described on the company's web site as being a wormery. In my untutored eyes it was the Harley Davidson of wormeries. I also invested in 1 kg of Tiger worms because those from the previous wormery had by now escaped into the wilderness that is my front garden. I hasten to add that my garden is a wilderness by choice because I have been following a course in permaculture design and I am learning to read the strengths and weaknesses of my small holding as part of preparing my overall plan and map for my 2 hectare holding.
I read the instructions carefully. In all modesty I can say that I am an eager reader of instructions and I follow them assiduously. Especially those originating abroad and which were translated into English by a junior secretary or office gopher to help their boss and save on the expense of a professional translator. I soaked the coir block overnight in water to provide the initial base for the wormery and laid newspaper over the screen at the bottom so that the worms would not slip through the drainage holes and be lost. And then, in a touching private ceremony, I introduced the worms to their new home. As a shamanic practitioner I dedicated their work and mine to the good of all our relatives on the planet, human, animal, plant, natural resources, rocks, you name it. I could feel the love of Mother Earth and Father Sky enveloping us. As advised I gave the worms time to settle for a few day and get their living conditions sorted out. As you know, we all have our own little ways of making a house a home and I assumed that worms operating in a different sphere to me would most likely prefer to do it their way. A few days later when I opened their Silver Palace I was shattered to discover that a seeming massacre had taken place. There were black streaks tarnishing the inside walls of the wormery but not a worm in sight or on site. I couldn't understand how they could have escaped and was puzzled by their apparent "break-out" … until last week, that is.
I had by now decided to try my hand with a Bokashi bucket. I was driven to that by having undergone ten days without electricity during the recent heat wave as a result of a bureaucratic stand-off and bungle which pincered me in the grip of a Wifi supplier and a State utility. As a result I had to empty my fridge and freezer and clean it out completely. I haven't needed to use the refuse bin for several months now being, as I try to be, an almost-Vegan and 90% Vegetarian who is also religion averse. But the waste collectors would not accept my rotting meat, fish, and veggies in the recycle bin for composting. They slapped a big sticker on the blue bin labelling it "contaminated". That is when I decided to step into Bokashi buckets, figuratively that is, of course. A quick search on the theme of recycling contaminated food and I found my way via "composting toilets" (which are also on my list, but further down) to Bokashi Buckets. I thought it odd when I saw a picture of my above-mentioned Silver Palace wormery, but now masquerading as a BB. I didn't ponder deeply on it because it seemed to be the immediate answer to my problem of recycling rotten food before the health authorities stepped in.
Bokashi Kitchen Bucket
So, when earlier today a courier delivered my new Bokashi Kitchen Bucket, I settled down to read the instructions carefully and began to assemble it. Smaller than the silver wormery I have described above, it soon became obvious to me that the components were the same in each. Interesting! Then I read the words "anaerobic environment" and the scales fell from my eyes. To be honest, it felt more like slates being ripped off the roof of my house in a hurricane. I now had to admit to myself that unintentially but with ignorance guiding me I had committed genocide on a kilogram of Tiger worms, a whole city full of Nature's hardest, unheralded and undemanding workers. The awful truth now screamed at me: "Worms need air to breathe and therefore cannot exist in anaerobic conditions. You, ya eejit, signed their death warrants when you sealed them up for three days in a coir bed in an air-tight container."
There now, I've gotten it off my chest. I am a changed person. I now know what not to do. Tomorrow a new adventure starts. Not a worm will be put in the Bokashi Kitchen Bucket and a new coir block will herald a new era of wormery. I think that a different launch ceremony will be necessary to convince the worms that they are safe and that they will be needed for their skill elsewhere than in a bucket. The philosopher (unqualified) in me is even beginning to think that this experience might, as a metaphor, have relevance in the Middle East.
Posted in bloggingfundamentals, Change, Humour, Ireland, irishtimes, journal.ie, Life and Death, Uncategorized
June 8, 2018 WolflanderLeave a comment
Dateline: Friday June 8, 2018
In today's Irish Times, it is reported that "Supporters of a radical scheme to upend Switzerland's financial system have made an 11th hour appeal to voters to approve a proposal to strip banks of the power to create new money through lending". What a brilliant initiative and about time. I've just had a dust-up with my own bank, y'know, (Well, I don't actually own it but you know what I mean) because they have the nasty, sneaky, practice of taking money out of my back pocket and giving it to people they don't know without asking my permission. If I want to pay a bill, but don't have enough money to cover it, then, of course, they will slap me (metaphorically, of course, across the knuckles) and say "No, no, no, you naughty man, not till we tell you that you can". Well, what they are actually doing is processing incoming debits before my pension is lodged. They could have done it in the other sequence of first lodging my pension, and then peeling off enough to pay the incoming demands, which, I hasten to add, are legitimate. I have checked with a few other people including small businesses and the same is happening to them. As we already know, the banks are now completely controlled by computers and human staff reduced to work like robots, while their directors behave towards the public like Daleks in Dr. Who?
The trick, just in case you didn't know, is that the system pays incoming POS (point-of-sale) requests from traders from whom you have bought something or (in my case) with whom you have a standing order for regular subscriptions. Then, if the account balance is low and there is not enough in the account at that instant, the debit is made in any case, putting the account into the red, incurring a penalty charge. When the debits have been processed, any incoming credits, e.g., my pension, are then processed, and (in my case) bring the account back into the black but with the effect of effectively reducing my pension sometimes by up to 20%.
Now if the sequence were the other way around I would not have paid any penalties in my nearly 20 years with the Bank! I have gone to the trouble of graphing my bank balance against time since I first opened the account in 2003. The clear pattern emerged that shows that anytime I have incurred a penalty was between 02.00h and 04.00h on Friday mornings. In the middle of the night! This is when all, or nearly all, of the bank staff and their families, are in the arms of Morpheus. That is also when I am usually asleep. But, as they say, money never sleeps. Note this, however, someone chose to brief the IT people in the Bank to devise that system. In that way. On the few occasions where I had been hit badly and painfully by the process I challenged them and lodged official complaints.
I should explain that my complaints were always on an ethical, moral, even a philosophical basis. I think that it doesn't sound right to speak about money as if it were something dirty and grubby. But then I don't really understand finance. Between you and me and the wall, I believe that money is an imaginary entity, a concept without a reason, a spirit without a body. My sympathies have always been with the Unwise Virgins. Why should any normal young woman, keep her wick trimmed and her lamp lit in the middle of the night just in case her boss came home late and on the off-chance that he might have lost his keys. Indeed I often wondered why those Virgins, Wise and Unwise, didn't join up with the Labourers in the Vineyard while the Boss was away. I'd say now that Ten Unwise Virgins would have sorted out those Vineyard boyos, whether they came late or early. Any way, back to my complaints. One of them was acknowledged by the Complaints Department who promised to reply to my complaint within a fortnight. That was two years ago and I still have not received a reply! But me being a "cute hoor" I'm still counting down on the clock! There could be one hell of a fairy goodwill gesture in the pipeline. Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
The other magic trick to look out for is what I call "The Ride of the Little Old Man". When someone transfers money to me it doesn't show up in my account for about four days. The same is true if I am sending money to you. It goes out of my account immediately but won't show up in your account for about another four days either. Where has the money been for those four days? Well, in the old days, when the bank officials wrote with quill pens and home-made ink, it did genuinely take time to record every single transaction, have it checked, signed off by the manager, and details sent to the Central Bank or wherever for whatever central banks do with that information. In fact, they sent a little old man on a high Nelly bicycle with a big woven-willow delivery box hanging off the handlebars, and it full of envelopes containing all the financial information to stoke the financial fires of the Central Bank.
Needless to say, given his age he probably stopped off every now and then to slake his thirst, chat with the lads, you know yourself. But that was back then. And it took time for the L.O.M to get there and back. And certainly he had to make more than one journey of it. And that was a thirst-creating job. And stressful in the extreme. And now? Well, you know, traditions die hard in these great, important, financial institutions. And they have maintained the tradition of "The Little Old Man" to bring a whiff of nostalgia and a stabilising sense of tradition to the business.
You have only to look at their advertisements on the telly to see how much they care about young couples starting out, starry-eyed on life's journey, having smiling babies, buying their first house. The same financial institutions are also thoughtful to take care of the money saved up by the elderly for their retirement and, sure, isn't that why they are smiling and untroubled by anxiety, even though their eldest son is still sleeping at home on the coach. He is at least married but his wife and children are with her mother's people. The elderly smiling couple alluded to above. At least, the fees for the photo shoots might pay for tomorrow's dinner. And so on. You are doubtless impressed by the care and forethought of the financial institutions, aren't you? Like *%^??#?/*%^??#?/ (expletives deleted). Oh, and by the way, whenever I have complained very LOUDLY, and remonstrated, and used very strong undeleted language, do you know what? Within a week a fairy seems to have sent me a "goodwill gesture". At least, that's what it said on my account statement, the gesture, I mean. Not the fairy. And now, in my "cere and yellow years", that's why I still believe in the good fairy, the tooth fairy, and the f-f-f-f-f-inancial f-f-f-f-airy!
Goodnight now to children everywhere. Sleep tight and don't let the bugs bite. Don't forget to say a little prayer to Holy God, for your local Bank Manager and Bank Directors. And don't forget the Swiss Banks as well. Sure, don't they all need the odd oul' prayer to protect them? Because they don't know the day nor the hour when the Law Officer will come knocking on the door. "I'd like to invite you to come down to the Station with me to answer a few little questions". Cometh the day, cometh the sentence! And, of course, it's about time, isn't it? The longer the time the better, sez you!
Posted in Humour, Ireland, Personal blog, Satire
Filming an Owl at Night
Democracy wishes to elevate mankind to teach it to think, to set it free. It seeks to set it free. It seeks to remove from culture the stamp of privilege and disseminate it among the people
June 5, 2018 September 1, 2018 WolflanderLeave a comment
Dateline: Sunday June 3 2018 13.00h
Shillelagh, Co. Wicklow, Ireland
When I checked my mail and incoming messages this morning, I found a post from my friend and translation guru, #Antain_ Mac_Lochlainn
Why is today's Google Doodle an image of Mick McCarthy filming an owl?
Ever the one for the smart-arse reply, I penned the following and went about my day.
"i think that th'oul owl is holding the prompt sheet for Mick while he is operating a concealed but very sophisticated ballistic missile guidance system of North Korean origin to assassinate the woodpecker, who, as every Irish Soccer supporter knows, is a symbol representing our renowned Keano (nudge, nudge) Cork hit-man, who was always pecking away at poor Mick and making his life a misery as manager of the national team. The image of the stag in the background is a literary allusion to the words of the German poet who wrote that "the Irish will always drag down a noble stag".
I admit, after that response, I felt a nagging regret that I couldn't remember the name of the German poet who made that remark. Perhaps the reader would get the impression that the quote was composed by me and think I was initiating an assault on the people of Ireland. I get enough abuse as it is for some of my sharper comments about Irish life, so I did a Google search to see if I could get evidence to clarify the origin. And I did.
I got a real shock when I followed the thread of the search. I then purchased an online e-book (referenced below) to confirm the details and got further information. C.J. Jung was right. There is such a thing as coincidence. But there is also synchronicity. I will let Jung speak for himself and when you finish reading come back here and see what it means in practice: Link <http://www.thinking-minds.net/carl-jung-synchronicity/>
It reaches parts of the brain that ordinary thinking hasn't reached.
"Blood Kindred – W.B.Yeats – "The Life, the Death, the Politics"
by W.J. McCormack
Publisher Pimlico 2005
Epub ISBN 9781446444245This link will take you to the book I refer to in the blog
And so the story begins … … tread softly, and all that jazz!
In Ireland in the late 1920s and early 1930s, after the Civil War, there was a period of unsettled ideas during which there were attempts made to re-orientate an emerging Irish national identity. Think: de Valera and comely maidens dancing at the cross-roads whilst lusty young men were batin' the tar out of one another in the field over the ditch. At the same time a younger Sean Lemass was dreaming determinedly of clouds of smoke from industrial activity over the Lakes of Killarney, bringing pollution (what's that) and prosperity (yes, please) to a fairly poverty afflicted country. Around the same period, anti-Semites were also emerging as a result of World War 1. In the ferment of ideas, attempts were made to create links between Irish aspirations and the developing ideas in Europe concerning nationhood. And the names of many that are known to us and revered by us now, such as, W.B.Yeats were caught up in that debate. There was also, Maud Gonne who was one of Yeats' "intimate" friends who also, it appears, had anti-Semitic leanings. Incidentally, one of the first files opened on a citizen by G2, the Irish Army Intelligence Unit, was opened on said Maud Gonne. The celebrity list is long so try googling a few other names that come to your mind.
Links were being identified between anti-Semitism and the rise of totalitarianism in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. The poets Ezra Pound (America) and T.S.Eliot (England) expressed strong views on Fascism in general. Yeats joined with them but he was more interested in events developing in Italy under Mussolini. Pound and Eliot commented on the threats posed by Jews and Judaism to what Ezra Pound regarded as a "civilised society", e.g., his own America and Eliot's England. In Germany Karl von Ossietsky was committed to a Nazi concentration camp in the late 1930s because he was a Gentile who defended the Jews from the anti-Semites. His supporters petitioned the Nobel Peace Prize Committee to award their peace prize to Ossietsky. Yeats' friend, Ethel Mannin also supported their petition. Yeats wrote to her: "If the Nobel Society did what you want, it would seem to the majority of the German people that the Society hated their Government for its politics not because it was inhuman". This refusal by Yeats to offer public support for a Gentile victim of Nazism has led some people to suggest that Yeats was a supporter of Nazism. But the story was not clearly black and white regarding Yeats. The emerging information of implied friendship between Yeats and notable Jews he met in Ireland was seen by some as evidence of a vague kind of affinity between the two nations, the Irish and the Jews, because they were both perceived to be victims of history and of persecution.
While Yeats was touring in the United States in 1920 he publicly supported the Palestine Restoration Fund (PRF). This should NOT be confused with today's Palestine Liberation Front! The PRF was an initiative of the Zionist movement which had been launched to establish a permanent Jewish homeland. This seemed to raise doubts about where Yeats really stood on the situation. How could he support the promotion of a Jewish homeland and at the same time fail to confront a German State that was publicly hostile to the Jews. Truth is we do not know for sure whom he was supporting.
The Balfour Declaration (1926 and 1930) was not clear in its intentions. Was it actually supporting the creation of a new homeland for the Jewish diaspora? Was it part of Britain's imperial policy for expansion including the Middle East? Or did it owe something to the apparently parallel histories of the Irish and the Jews? Don't forget also that W.T. Cosgrave, President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, was an official representative of the new Irish State at that meeting so the views of the Irish Government were being expressed also! Or, indeed, was the aim of the founding and establishing of a "home" for the Chosen People (i.e., the Jews) a conspiracy to get the Jews out of Europe and dump them on some other part of the world. Uganda and Alaska had been mooted as alternative sites where they might find room and be removed from their problematic presence in a Europe which was divided about their presence!
Other information adduced about Yeats' attitudes were based upon the occasion in August 1928 when he was accused of being very rude to Erich Gottgetram, a Jew, when they both were house guests at Coole Park, Maud Gonne's family home in Sligo. The evidence is slim and the interpretations many! But in McCormack's book referenced above he suggests that Maud Gonne was in contact with the German spy, Oscar Pfaus, who was chosen to contact the IRA early in 1939. And don't overlook the fact that Roger Casement had earlier been in contact with the German Government soliciting their aid for the Irish rising in 1916.
Pfaus was the Hamburg chief of an organisation called "Fichte Bund", whose motto was "Union for World Veracity". According to McCormack "… they debated Jewish responsibility for the partition of Ireland with Pfaus insisting that 'most of the British propaganda which is flooding Éire is coming from British-Jewish sources in Belfast' and (Maud) Gonne in return (was) seeking evidence of 'Jewish interference in this matter."
In February 1934, Yeats was awarded the Goethe-Plakette because his plays and poetry with their mystical and folklore interests were clearly compatible with the ideology they were proclaiming. Yeats' plays in particular had been translated into German and were popular with the Government and its supporters. But not all Germans were of the same opinion.
Thomas Mann, the German writer and winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote about a different future for Germany. His concerns were about "democracy considered as thought". He wrote: "Democracy wishes to elevate mankind to teach it to think, to set it free. It seeks to set it free. It seeks to remove from culture the stamp of privilege and disseminate it among the people – in a word it aims at education". I suggest that Mann's views are as relevant today, perhaps even more relevant, in an Austerity Era where education and art and music and culture, need to be made available to all. Instead they are being withdrawn from the reach of those who need them most. These are not luxury items to be reserved for one group only. They are essential to enable all citizens to participate fully in the development of their own society. These so-called finer things of life are also the building blocks of a free society. They are part of the very soul of democracy.
My trawl through the back streets and quaint resources of the Internet this afternoon gave me the opportunity to browse through those nuggets of information, telling me about the role of Irish leaders in the early development of our State. But all those described above fade into the background, yet provide the base upon which I can display the treasure of my random rummaging of information. And in a happy "coincidental" manner it provides a tantalising background to the final item. In all honesty, this one frightens the life out of me.
In a pamphlet produced by Terramare Publications of Berlin in 1937, two years and two months before I was born and two years before World War II started, Rudolf Frerds's "Population Papers" iwere published as a pamphlet under the title "Germany Speaks". He wrote "… [this paper] addresses the problem of the falling birth rate among 'families hereditarily endowed with the highest qualities' and the rising rate among 'families with a large number of social inadaptable elements'." Nazi laws had been introduced in July 1933, the year in which my paternal grandfather, Rudolf Pratschke, gave my father, František Mořic Anton Pratschke (known in Cobh as "Tony") a copy of Hitler's "Mein Kampf". He told him to read it and protect himself.
My Dad had Austro-Hungarian citizenship up until 1933 and if, as was the fear when the war started, that with the help and support of the IRA and the Irish people, Hitler might invade Ireland from the Atlantic side and create a pincer movement on England, then my father could have been drafted into the German Army. Can you imagine a man who spoke Irish, a member of Connradh na Gaeilge where he met my mother, who was an athlete with Ballymore Athletic club, who played hurling with Carrigtwohill and coached young hurlers in the Cobh Hurling Club, suddenly sucked into the vortex of war and death and destruction. The fears and anxieties that I experienced as a child in my pre-verbal years left an indelible mark on my psyche that only now I am beginning to evaluate and try to understand?!
In 1938, Joachim von Ribbentrop was appointed Hitler's Foreign Minister. In the National Library of Ireland in Dublin there is preserved a copy of that book which came from Yeats' personal book collection. Von Ribbentrop liked Yeats' plays and felt that they resonated well with Nazi Germany's efforts to integrate their mythological Teutonic past, just as Yeats integrated our mythical Celtic heroes into his vision of Ireland. There is another article in that book, "Germany Speaks". It is titled "The Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring" and it includes reference to the provision (28 June 1935) abolishing "the maxim according to which no offence can be punished unless it is specifically in the existing code of law". In other words, if it's not listed as an offence then there is no offence.
My thoughts now, as I review my afternoon's exposure to this flow of "coincidental" (sic!) incidents from Ireland's history are focusing on the central question. What Pandora's Box have we now opened as a result of the recent Referendum on the Eighth Amendment? I would ask you to consider that question and try to imagine what might happen over the next several years if we fail, again, to identify the legal framework required to enhance the lives of Irish people as civilised human beings who are concerned with ultimate questions for which we struggle to reach a consensus decision. How sure are we that we will always be able to elect a Dáil with the competence, the intelligence, and the courage to appoint a Taoiseach and Ministers who can and will lead our people and protect them from the evils that flow from failure to understand the issues facing us, and an unwillingness to face and discuss our shared perceptions of reality?
And to finish, I am glad to say that I identified the quotation source. Yeats had repeated a remark made by the German poet, Goethe who had written: "The Irish seem to me to be like a pack of hounds, always dragging down some noble stag". Think about it. Please.
i I was unable to find a direct reference to this article by Frerd, but I stumbled on this item which is of related interest. It is an onine (available free) copy of Deirdre Toomey's "Yeats and Women: Yeats Annual No. 9" which contains a lot of information relating to Yeats and eugenics.
ii The web site linked to the "German Voices" will have brought you to a German language site. It is not necessary to understand German because I just wished to draw your attention to the fact that W.B. Yeats is the only one on that list of winners in the era concerned who does not have a German name. He appears to have been the only foreign winner over that period.
Posted in bloggingfundamentals, Celtic, Community, Democracy, Democratic structures, Europe, Gaelic, Germany, Ireland, irishtimes, journal.ie, Meditation, Mythology, Personal blog, Satire
Taking the "dum(b)" out of Referendum
The democratic process in Ireland has shown a new face, a new vigour, a renewed belief in the power of One-ness. We should now, in gratitude, turn to face the rising Sun of change.
May 28, 2018 WolflanderLeave a comment
In the lead-up to the Referendum, I had struggled with how I might vote. Neither "Yes" nor "No" in itself would or could solve the problems we face. The public debate and commentary was too rigid but I sensed an energy and a movement that was hard to pin down. The same old self-satisfied and smug posturings seemed to dominate the media. For the first time in my life, I deliberately abstained from voting, because even though my sympathies were with the "Yes" campaign I found the public arguments too simplistic and I feared that some of the allegedly "feminist" rhetoric was too phobic towards men. I do not believe in the mythology of virgin birth so how could I support a cause that was apparently excluding men from the solution as well as implicitly vilifying them as being part of the cause?
I am Irish, I live in Ireland and we have just voted in a referendum that has shattered the old political structures and brought world-wide attention to the Emerald Isle. Nostalgia for an old romantic view of Ireland has been dispersed by a wind of change and a new confident electorate is emerging from the chrysalis of romantic Celtic dreams. I needn't have worried, This convincing win for the "Yes" vote was not carried by the old politics no matter how hard they may try to convince themselves. This battle for a new Ireland was not planned nor fought in the old "smoke-filled" environment of political parties. It was fought hand-to-hand, doorstep-to-doorstep, street-by-street with courage and conviction by people who must be trusted.
The impetus came from a groundswell of grass-roots activism, dominated by younger people and by some new women and men who were not shackled by the old political system or personal religious convictions, but who brought a vigorous and vibrant force to bear. "A terrible beauty is born" (W.B.Yeats). It has brought activism to the fore and relegated old fashioned revisionist politics to "crying the catch cries of the clown". It has gone further than the now-hackneyed phrase of "new politics" dared to go.
Posted in Change, Community, Democracy, Democratic structures, Ireland, Life and Death, Mythology, UncategorizedTagged Evolution, Ireland, Referendum, Social Change, vision
The Russian Soul is like a Dark Forest!
Should we not withhold all judgment and jumping to conclusions until we know the facts?
March 28, 2018 March 30, 2018 WolflanderLeave a comment
Dateline Wednesday, March 28, 2018
I am puzzled as to why the U.S. and the U.K., in particular, have now mounted a very aggressive campaign to point the finger at Russia claiming that Mr. Putin and his Government are behind the alleged assassination attempt on the former Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal and his daughter, in Salisbury, England. What is their evidence? On March 26th on the RTÉ news I heard a spokesperson for the Irish Government claiming that they couldn't share the evidence available to them, primarily one assumes through U.K. sources, because it would undermine our national security! Some other E.U. governments have been more certain in pointing the finger at Russia. Nevertheless on the late news on March 26 it was announced that Ireland was not among the 16 EU countries that announced the expulsion of Russian representatives earlier but that a decision would be taken by Cabinet on Tuesday morning (March 27), amid indications that at least one Russian citizen would be expelled. Unfortunately, our varying versions of democracy across the world reverberate to the words of the Chinese proverb – "The reed that will not bend with the wind, will break". I presume that the same principle is now being applied by the Irish Government in supporting our neighbour, the U.K. in denouncing Russia, when it is emphasised that we are supporting our nearest neighbour. Mar dhea!
Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, collapsed in a shopping centre in Salisbury, England, on March 4 after being allegedly poisoned with a nerve agent. They remain in critical condition. He had been a double-agent but he was pardoned and sent to the UK as part of a spy swap in 2010, in which Russia released four agents to the US and the UK in exchange for 10 Russian agents in the US. Very shortly after the assassination attempt, Theresa May pointed the finger at Russia in a statement to Parliament, saying it was "highly likely" that Russia ordered the assassination of the double agent Sergei Skripal. Ms. May also said that either Russia ordered the attack or that they had "lost control" of the nerve agent to others. In this way she implied that somebody with access to the Russian-made nerve agent Novichok could have carried out the attack. As she didn't answer that question herself, we can only presume that this means if Russia didn't do it then someone else must have! But who? Russia's foreign ministry dismissed May's statement as a "fairy tale".
It appears to me that despite the assertive language used by Ms. May, as Prime Minister, she was very short on facts. It is a fact that Sergei Skripal had been a double agent who after being arrested in Russia had then been released to England as part of a spy swop. It is a fact that his daughter, Yulia, who was visiting him, was also affected by the nerve agent. It has not to my knowledge been stated definitively that it was Novichoc that had been used. If the nerve agent had been stolen or bought from the Russians, how certain is it that the agent used was originally made by Russia. If others now had access to it, is it possible that these unnamed "others" now had the capability to produce it or to produce another version of the same nerve agent? In such a serious international incident as this, it is essential that we deal with the facts and that implies that we should use an evidence-based approach. Emotional reactions, not mediated by reason, are understandable but not to be acted on. Over the past 48 hours it is quite amazing to me that so many countries have fallen into line behind the U.S. and the U.K. leaders, both of whom have been under a lot of pressure recently.
What is the real story, where are the real facts, who is the guilty party, or are we looking at the possibility of "guilty parties"? I know that many will dismiss my comments as crazy, even biased, or as yet another conspiracy theory, but let me put them out there now, admittedly with the health warning attached that we are still in the stage of hypotheses based on partial information, misinformation, possibly on misinterpreted or "false" facts, on opinion, or on mere suspicion!
In such a situation I believe it is right to ask the question: Who is benefiting from this attack? Is it Sergei Skripal and his daughter? Definitely not! The policeman who first found them? Definitely not? Could it be Ms May, Prime Minister of the U.K.? Apparently yes, because overnight she has become the self-appointed but almost unanimously accepted leader of a pack of howling national and international bodies! Could it be President Trump? Definitely yes, if only based on the old adage, "give a dog a bad name …! " What about President Putin? It appears that he is the guilty party in the eyes of many observers in the Western alliance. He was recently re-elected as President of Russia in an election that was heavily criticised by observers and by the opposition leaders in his own country. That may be so, but Russia is now threatened with even more sanctions and threats of "retaliation" thrown at them. Already half the E.U., plus the U.S, Canada, and Australia are dismissing Russian diplomats from their countries. I can't see that as a benefit! So what had Mr. Putin to gain?
Taking the U.S, and U.K. first: Note that several U.S. Presidents, Obama, Bush, "Baby" Bush, and others before them and including the present incumbent have had individuals who were opposing them "taken out" by the Pentagon/Secret Service using drones, assassins, spies. We in Ireland know from our own experience and history of the dirty tricks, double agents, undercover military forces that have been used by England to undermine our sovereignty for centuries and right up to today and including the self-same tactic of "removing", that is, killing individuals who were in their way.
For me, as an Irish observer, there is another very interesting and intriguing parallel between Russia and Ireland, despite the vast difference in size.
For centuries Russia was ruled by Tsars who were remote from the ordinary individual who was treated as a peasant with no rights and often owned by the local land-owner. The Tsar was the only authority. When the Communist Revolution of 1917 happened, the new rulers, despite their different and ambitious philosophy, created a society that led to the enslavement of the ordinary citizen. Only 25% of Russian citizens from 1917 to 1989 were ever members of the Communist Party! As a result, the concept of authority over one's life was remote and virtually non-existent for many Russians over the centuries.
For over 800 years, Ireland was subject to rule firstly by the invading Normans and subsequently by England. Over those centuries the Irish people had no authority over their own island, because the ultimate political authority lay with the King/Queen in England and the ultimate religious authority lay with the Pope in Rome. This latter point is interesting because, due to its geographical isolation from an emerging Europe, Christianity in Ireland developed around independent monasteries and related communities ruled by abbots whereas in Europe, in general, Christianity was developed around administrative dioceses and bishops who were subject to the Pope in Rome. This led to Irish Christianity being seen as a threat to Christianity in Europe. For those 800 years, Irish people dealt only with authority that was foreign and based outside the island of Ireland.
Both the average Russian and the average Irish citizen today have inherited a culture where the role of the individual is conceived of as not being linked to the authority figure appointed by a distant ruler. These parallel histories have led to two geographically distant national and cultural entities being predisposed by their inherited conditioning to view a national authority in a similar way which is quite different from that of other nations in Europe.
I was born two months after World War II started, so I was a child during the period 1939 to 1945. I have childhood memories of the fear around me at home in the kitchen when we listened each night to the radio to find out what was happening in those distant places and imagined places called England and Germany. I have memories of food shortages and being given a slice of bread and butter with sugar sprinkled on it as a "nice surprise" after dinner. I remember my early national school and secondary school days during the recovery years of the later 1940s and through the 1950s. My younger self still has memories of the Cold War period and the fears that could erupt at the slightest threat. I remember a Catholic tabloid weekly newspaper carrying the headline story one week-end that "a blue light would shine in the Eastern sky when Russia was converted to Christianity". We didn't realise that the Russian people were already Christian and of the Orthodox kind. Many years later I discovered that my father's earlier status as technically a citizen of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire carried the ever-present danger that if Hitler invaded Ireland to attack England on a second front, then my father ran the risk of being press-ganged into the German Army! My mother lived in fear throughout those war years. The stand-off over the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 instilled the fear in me that another light of a different colour and toxicity might illuminate our skies bringing nuclear warfare. Most of my weekends in the 1960s were devoted to demonstrations against the Vietnam war, or travelling to Belfast to join in demonstrations led by my comrades in the Peoples' Democracy movement. Today's events, following the attack on Sergei Skripal awaken those old fears in me. Should we not withhold all judgment and jumping to conclusions until we know the facts? Isn't that what diplomacy is supposed to be about? Should we also not be more careful, as a sovereign country, about the friends with whom we align ourselves. The biggest loser in all this will be democracy. Yes, and I repeat that in case you miss my point: The biggest loser in the present confrontation will be democracy.
I have been observing national and international politics for several years and I still see democracy as a very fragile institution. We hear it spoken of as if it has been around since the emergence of early settled human habitations. We see regular references to Greece being the home of democracy starting 2,000 years ago. We overlook the fact, however, that their democracy was confined to land-owning males, while women (unless they owned land in their own right), foreigners, and slaves were excluded. Today the word "democracy" is very much a catch-all concept covering a wide variety of emerging democratic systems. Which of those allegedly established democratic systems are strong enough to survive another period of Cold War hostilities? Will Westminster, the self-styled home of Western democratic government survive Brexit? Why can't the tribal leaders of the stand-off parties in Northern Ireland not exercise the democratic mandate they were given and form a government? How will the democracies of France and Germany cope with an E.U. that is suffering from a democratic deficit according to so many of the other member countries? Democracy is supposed to be the system that gives a representative voice to every citizen in the running of their own country. But under the pressures of global capitalism and neo-liberal governments, the very fabric of community life has been atomised, communities and local government structures have been undermined and weakened, the links between government and citizen are being eroded and the stability of the "nation state" is being shaken to its foundations. That is why I suggest that the greatest loser in the present crisis will be democracy itself.
My own life experience has taught me that we would be wise to tread carefully in how we respond to this crisis. I would like to offer some personal information in support of what I have written. I am not anyone special in the sense of having a unique insight into politics or into human behaviour. I have, however, worked for nearly forty years on international development aid projects in Russia, Eastern Europe, Africa (East and South), the Middle East, and in South-East Asia, where I had interaction with American, European, and local politics. I have learned from doing and from being involved and then from questioning myself about what has happened, and why it has happened. This has given me an existentialist and "outsider" view of life and living. Because we now take so much for granted about democracy, behaviour such as that surrounding the events in Salisbury, the rise of Fascism in Europe, the tightening grip of global capitalism, are inevitable and threatening.
In my first eight years of working after qualifying as an electrical engineer from University College Cork, I worked as a teacher in Limerick, Ireland. I learned from my life and my work there, the importance of theatre and the arts in society and their role is holding a mirror up to democracy, and the need to fight for what one believed in. I became a very active Socialist and irritant gadfly in the Irish Labour Party. I began to discern the dark shadow behind the tribal politics of Ireland. From there I spent a four year stint in Zambia where I witnessed the tensions between an emerging African democracy and the remaining colonial presence of Rhodesia, which was supported by the apartheid regime of South Africa. I was working in Angola in South-West Africa when the Portuguese revolution happened in 1975 and a civil war broke out in while I was there. I saw at first hand the efforts of the ruling Portuguese authorities to use development and trade to keep the local native population away from the rebel forces. They failed.
Returning to Ireland I trained with the Tavistock Institute as a consultant in group dynamics and organisational behaviour. Running training programmes in companies and workshops for public applicants, I saw at first hand, the underlying dynamics of organisational, institutional and social behaviour in Ireland and how that unconscious behaviour interacted with the established conscious structures and behaviour of those in positions of power and authority.
I worked in the former East Germany in 1989-90 on a contract with the Treuhandanstalt during the efforts to align the institutions and companies coming from the former Communist system with the new requirements of the market economy. I saw the short-lived hopes and expectations of those from the East who told me that their vision had been to build a new Germany and then move forward together with their relations and fellow citizens from the former West Germany. That vision and those hopes were shattered when the "Wessies" just took charge and treated the "Ossies" as second-class citizens in their shared new country. From there I moved to work in Russia for most of the 1990s. I worked as development aid consultant and team leader on some EU TACIS projects and saw at first hand the way in which American and European governments conspired to ensure that Russia would never recover from the mistakes of the Soviet era. I also was witness to the way in which the E.U. bowed to the demands of the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, to change the nature of the development aid programmes from small-scale interventions to help local communities and institutions to major projects with political rather than developmental aims.
On one occasion, after a year's work in which we received great praise from our Russian counterparts and the Russian authorities for the ongoing success of our project in rural development, and were regularly "wheeled out" to tell visiting dignitaries about our achievements, the renewal of my contract with the UK Overseas Development Service was blocked by the U.S. dominated International Finance Corporation (IFC). I had asked Boris Efimovich Nemtsov, then my senior contact and Governor of the Nizhny Novgorod Province, to help me to get access to James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, when he visited the city on a tour of projects. I had a fifteen minute interview with Mr. Wolfensohn, who was very courteous and positive. He liked the proposal I outlined and initiated a World Bank process whereby his officials worked with us to develop the project scope. As a result a micro-finance project was established three months later to provide financial support for small businesses in Nizhny NovgorodNizhny Novgorod.
My actions were strongly motivated by humanitarian concerns, seeing new Russian farmers being given farms which were already bankrupt when they received them, who were refused finance by the new Russian banks (re-financed from the West) because they had no collateral to offer. I "walked the land" on a number of occasions with farmers who were in the depths of depression and desperate because they literally didn't know what to do with the rusted machinery, broken equipment, collapsing sheds and outbuildings on their farms and didn't know how they could cope. They asked for our help and we gave them what we could. But we couldn't produce miracles in a country where the land had been poisoned by the overuse in Soviet times of fertilisers, pesticides, and chemical sprays and had to be allowed to recover slowly using traditional organic methods. By a strange "co-incidence", when, years later, Mr. Putin eventually decided to close the IFC office in Moscow, most of the staff, mainly Americans, Poles and Ukrainians were transferred to a new office opened in the Ukraine. Boris Efimovich, Provincial Governor, went on to become a Deputy Prime Minister under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin of the Russian Federation. Sadly, in February 2015, I read that Boris Efimovich was assassinated on a street near the Duma (Russian Parliament building in Moscow). He had always been opposed to Vladimir Putin who, he claimed, was out to kill him. But Nemtsov also represented the New Russian market capitalist system which was causing havoc in their country.
My final big project was in South Africa in 2001, where the "new" South Africa was shedding its apartheid past and was adapting its institutions to meet the demands of a multi-racial, multi-cultural, society. I started with a contract due to last six years. I left after six months when I realised that the Department of Labour, where I was based, was using E.U. funding from our project budget of €43 million to finance work that was already underway within the department while they were delaying in engaging with our project to build a new national industrial training and qualifications system that was targeting the African population. My German superiors promised support but backed down when the local E.U. office made it clear that negotiating new contracts with the South African government for the importation of South African wines into Europe would be jeopardised if the E.U. didn't comply with the status quo. I left to keep my own conscience clear. It was painful and depressing.
As well as that, I had begun to see a pattern that was repeated in different countries. I know the effect it had on me, but also I was extremely aware of the implications that pattern had for society in general and for the future. I decided to share my personal experiences rather than quote from the experience of others. I wonder will any of those who read this story detect a pattern? What pattern do you see? How does that pattern affect our society? Is it still being repeated in your country, in your life experience?
There is a saying in Russian that "the Russian Soul is like a Dark Forest". I fear that we are all now being sucked into a dark forest of misinformation, false news, where nothing is clearly defined and nothing is what it appears to be. What is happening now has the potential to destroy the progress we have made since the end of the Second World War. We face a situation where slow progress is required if we are to succeed but in a situation where instant gratification is the order of the day; where complex arguments have to be compressed into 200 characters or less; where decades of the concentration by media on mind-numbing entertainment where audiences now obsess on boxed sets of TV series portraying a controlled and modulated society where dissent is not allowed or where every problem is resolved by superheroes. We are, indeed, in a dark forest.
As I write this, I have on my desk a photograph that I took one week-end in Russia, when I had the use of my landlady's dacha, or summer house in the forest outside the city of Nizhny Novgorod. I had left the rural bus that brought me close to my destination and was making my way on foot through the forest to the lodge. It was quite dark in the forest even at midday, but as I came to a turning in the track, I looked to my right and saw a small clearing where the sun shone brightly. It lifted my spirits and now it lifts my spirit again. The Russian forest is dark because the Russian people have suffered and been oppressed. That darkness has also clouded their spirit and taught them to suffer quietly. A Russian colleague who had lost his job as a research scientist when his institution closed down after the collapse of the Soviet Union, now drove our project car. When I greeted him each day at work with the words: "Hello Yuri, how are you today?" he replied "Still alive!" That response was common apparently when Stalin was in power. But the sun rises again and times change and, I believe, that Truth will once again be True. But only if we remember the darkness that is part of our lives and if we deal honestly with reality and question authority.
Posted in Change, Democracy, Democratic structures, Europe, Politics, Uncategorized
Remember that each one of us will, at some stage or another or even at many different stages in our life, come to a door or a path or a life option that is closed to us. We have the choice to turn away or to open that door, to travel that path, to make that choice.
February 8, 2018 Wolflander2 Comments
I first heard about the "Hero's Journey" back in the early 1970s. A colleague of mine, Paddy Walley, mentioned it in passing around the time that I was recruited as a Training Specialist in N.E.T., the fertiliser plant in Arklow. I didn't know much then about the "Hero's Journey" other than that occasional references to it appeared in the media dealing with training and organisation development issues. About the same time, I was encouraged by an Irish consultant, a behavioural scientist, the late Pat Quinn, who was working with the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, based in the U.K., to attend their annual Leicester Working Conference.
This "conference" was unlike anything I had ever experienced up to then. It was (and still is!) an experiential learning event. Unlike most conferences, where there is a lot of socialising and networking contacts, a lot of talks by panels of experts, and a "jolly good time" is had by all, financed usually by the sponsoring employers (think: scaled-down Davos and a rite of passage for aspiring executives), the Working Conference is an intense learning experience driven by the participants themselves, both consciously as a result of their desire to learn, but also unconsciously by their subliminal needs and desires and personal make-up.
A Working Conference as an experiential event is certainly different. There you learn from your own direct experience of interacting with others in the "here-and-now" as you work with them in an emerging organisational structure and struggle to understand what it's all about. At one level, you are thinking about the work you are trying to do from scratch, while at the same time, you are being encouraged to examine the process in which the group is engaged, communicating, thinking, doing, arguing, agreeing, visualising. That is, you are dealing with the what and the how of the Task but at the same time, struggling to understand the emerging dynamic of the Process of working together.
The conference consultants focus on analysing what the various groups and sub-groups are doing and interject from time to time with their hypotheses about what is happening in the group, as-a-group. They rarely if ever interact with individuals in the group, because their focus is the group as a group, as if it were a separate "animal" and the individuals merely different, but intrinsic, aspects of that "animal". The focus is on the dynamic way in which the Task and the Process interact, on how that interaction affects and is affected by the individuals in the group, at the level of both conscious and unconscious awareness, thinking, and behaviour.
The group consultant's only information is what they see and hear and sense around them. From that they develop a working hypothesis as to what might be going on in the psyches of the group members. It is impossible to describe the effect this has on each participant. Suffice it to say that on the morning of the second day (the conference lasted for a fortnight), I spent almost an hour before breakfast, on my knees, in the toilet bringing up what felt like everything I had ever eaten in my life. By the end of the fortnight, I was aware that the world had changed for me and that I had choices to make. In many ways a Working Conference is another example of the Hero's Journey in a limited time frame. My career took a radically different direction from then on. I would now in retrospect describe my life as surfing from one wave to the next, even from one Working Conference to another, caught up like a small canoe negotiating dangerous but exciting rapids. I have also attended three further working conferences and trained as a group relations consultant with the Tavistock Institute.
I mention all the above, because over the past few years since 2002, when I returned to Ireland, I have been struggling to cope with the consequences, some good, some bad, others yet to be evaluated, of my life in general. But I have learned how to look at these these situations in a more useful way, and most importantly, to accept life as it is rather than wish it were different. As part of this developing scenario, the name of Joseph Campbell arose again and again. He was the originator of the "Hero's Journey"! In this, his work is invaluable if you struggle at times to make sense of what is happening to you in your own life. The diagram below is just one of many different examples of how the different stages of the Hero's Journey may occur.
A schematic diagram showing different stages in the Hero's Journey.
Joseph Campbell was born in White Plains, New York,[2] the son of Josephine (née Lynch) and Charles William Campbell.[3] He was from an upper-middle-class Irish Catholic family. He was a scholar and was strongly influenced by the work of James Joyce. His book, "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", gives a good overview of his ideas. His work has influenced many modern writers and film-makers, such as George Lucas and "Star Wars", "The Matrix", the Harry Potter series, and many others. The popularity of those films and others like them, including folk tales, mythology, and fairy tales, is in large measure due to those stories being built upon a simple framework that we instinctively recognise and respond to as being rooted in our shared human nature.
The Hero faces his Nemesis
Today I came upon the film "The Timeless Tale of the Hero's Journey". [NOTE: This link will take you to a YouTube video summarising the Hero's Journey and that is then followed by a one-hour film expanding on the first video and pointing out the implications of the myth]. I have no regrets that it has taken so many years for my life to come full circle since then, with many repeated cycles of the Journey, from Paddy Walley's reference to it nearly fifty years ago right up to now. You will always find the Hero's Journey relevant to your search for meaning in your life, as well as helping you to recognise the "Here be Dragons!" sign.
The key point for anyone watching this film is to remember that this is not about a pantheon of heroes to be admired from a distance. Every human being since the dawn of our history is unique. We live in a gigantic, multi-dimensional, mind-boggling, cosmic arena that we still struggle to understand, so there is still plenty of room for your and my and his and her uniqueness to emerge and flourish. Remember that each one of us will, at some stage or another or even at many different stages in our life, come to a door or a path or a life option that is closed to us. We have the choice to turn away or to open that door, to travel that path, to make that choice. You don't have to be famous, or fantastically clever or skilled or wealthy see your life as your Hero's Journey.
Watch this film and you will understand why!
Posted in Change, Community, Democracy, Democratic structures, Evolutionary Activism, Life and Death, Mythology, Personal blog, Taoism, UncategorizedTagged Evolution, Mythology
Put a sock in it, Taoiseach!
"This is the third year in a row that we've had more resources, a bigger budget, more staff, more beds, more home care, and despite all that we haven't seen an improvement"
January 5, 2018 WolflanderLeave a comment
According to this morning's Irish Times, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has "expressed his frustration that higher public health spending is not improving services" because the number of people on hospital trolleys remains stubbornly high. He went on to express his regret to those members of the public who are affected. The Taoiseach also added: "This is the third year in a row that we've had more resources, a bigger budget, more staff, more beds, more home care, and despite all that we haven't seen an improvement". I hope we still have enough citizens in this country who have the testicular strength to shout "Bollix to that"! Anyone with a titter of wit could tell you that pouring money into a failed system is more than careless. And continuing to pour money in when you know that it will not bring better results is sheer insanity.
In fairness to him, I presume that Leo meant to reassure us all. The Taoiseach is lucky though that he has only to put up with frustration. I wonder has he stopped admiring his socks and taken stock of what is happening under the stewardship of his Government? We are being traumatised by the incompetence of those whom we have elected. We are being bewildered by the verbal gymnastics of Ministers, T.Ds. and oh-so-many other experts, advisors, and hangers-on who are running out of words to dodge their responsibilities while the world as we knew it is crumbling around us. Is dying on a trolley in a hospital corridor deemed an improvement on dying alone and cold on the streets of the City? Starting at the top of the incompetent organisation the old-fashioned tried and trusted rule of your beloved capitalist neo-liberal system is "piss, or get off the pot".
I am sorry, Taoiseach, that you are frustrated. Nevertheless, you and your retinue of sycophants should be down on your bloody knees in sack cloth and ashes begging forgiveness for what you have done, continue to do, and even worse, you plough on condoning the behaviour of banks and other financial institutions, courting favour with foreign fascists in the name of diplomacy, endorsing failure and blaming everyone but the culprits.
Why is this happening? Simplesh, says the meerkat! First of all, there is the Peter Principle and that allied with Parkinson's Law is the HSE in a nutshell. The Peter Principle arises from the simple observation that when people are promoted in an organisation they are usually selected on the basis of their current skills and performance in their current role, rather than on the abilities relevant to the intended role. And this is repeated ad nauseum until eventually they reach a point where they are not able to do their job. Stated simply, the Peter Principle asserts that every member in an organisation is eventually promoted to the level of their incompetence. In the case of the HSE, this mistake was compounded by transferring redundant personnel from the old Health Boards and finding space, rather than jobs, for them in the new super-duper HSE.
Then there is Parkinson's Law which states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". When one has an organisation staffed by "ropey" managers, supervisors, and administrators, who do not know how to manage the work of others who report to them, and when many of the those employed lack motivation, you have all the ingredients for an Irish Stew of Gargantuan proportions!
I suggest that Leo Varadkar's final statement merely adds insult to injury. Indicating that individual hospitals will be called to account for their performance, he said the Government will have to learn "why some places have very few patients on trolleys – in the case of Cavan, zero – and why others have many more". Isn't that a brilliant idea! How come no Government has come up with that idea before now? Makes me wonder what Health Ministers and Department of Health officials have been doing all those years. Perhaps they were just playing the "Pass the Potty" game!
Posted in Community, Democracy, Democratic structures, Ireland, Life and Death, Politics, Satire
Invitation to an inspiring Event!
Special on-line conference calls for participants from across Europe and from Ireland in particular
January 3, 2018 January 4, 2018 WolflanderLeave a comment
You may have already read my previous posts about the Pachamama Alliance and environmental issues. This time I bring you important information about the next Global Change Intensive programme. The Game Changer Intensive is a unique on-line course that will inspire you and equip you to become a game-changing leader in your community and a global citizen in the world.
Enrol in the Next Intensive by January 14
The next Game Changer Intensive begins January 23 and the last day to enrol is January 14. Just click on this link to enrol now.
How much will it cost me?
The Game Changer Intensive has a unique approach to tuition: it is voluntary and is paid at the end of the course. Upon completion, you are requested to subscribe in the Intensive, selecting an amount that reflects the value you have received from the course and your own ability to afford. In case it helps, an $100 donation helps cover the costs of one participant for the eight modules! You may also pay it in instalments. And it is voluntary!
What is this programme about?
There are two basic components to the Game Changer Intensive: who do we need to be, and what do we need to do to be effective in "changing the game". The knowledge you will gain, and the skills you will develop, can be applied to other aspects of your life, both political, social, and personal. No special educational level or qualifications are required and, as you will see from the information below, we use videos and short information sheets, on-line discussion forums (like social media discussion threads) , together with a weekly conference call in a small group of 6-10 participants with a moderator guiding you to discuss each week's topic with others on the programme.
I shall be organising special additional on-line conference calls for participants from across Europe and from Ireland in particular. Up to now the programme has focused primarily on North American responses to environmental issues. These European/Irish conference calls will enable us to begin applying what we learn to the issues we face as global citizens on this side of the Atlantic. More details will be supplied when you enrol.
Short description of the programme modules
Module 1: Introduction to Game Changing
The Game Changer Intensive begins with an examination of the ideas and concepts fundamental to being a "game changer", including understanding what is meant by the assertion that "the game is rigged," and that really changing the game involves "striking at the root" of the problems we face in our social and national systems.
Module 2: The Power of Story
A critical element of changing the game is being aware of and changing the collective cultural story that we have inherited and in which we live our lives. In this module we come to see that by generating and living in a new story of connection, compassion, and relatedness, the old story of separation and domination begins to lose its power.
Module 3: Evolutionary Activism
This module introduces the powerful concept of "Evolutionary Activism", which means that we learn to take responsibility for the role we are playing in actually shaping the future evolution of life on Earth.
Module 4: A Case for Grounded Optimism
When you consider the challenges of these times, do you find yourself resigned and in despair, or are you hopeful that a thriving, positive future is possible? This inspiring module presents evidence that a positive future is indeed achievable, and highlights the critical role of one's perspective and personal stand in the matter.
Module 5: The Rigged Game
This module looks into systems and structures of injustice that exist throughout society, with a focus on income inequality and institutional racism. Game Changer Intensive participants have a chance to explore how we are all, in one way or another, caught up in this rigged game.
Module 6: Game Changing Movements: Democracy
Understanding that democracy itself is at risk and the crucial work that needs to be done to remove it from the hands of moneyed interests and corporate power is the work of Module 6. The goal: how to become part of a movement committed to creating a government of, by, and for the people, where the voices of the people are heard.
Module 7: Game Changing Movements: Climate Change
Henry David Thoreau asks, "What's the use of a fine house if there isn't a tolerable planet to put it on?" Module 7 addresses https://youtu.be/XVSgbU6WVSkthe urgent matter of taking action to address climate change, with an emphasis on the game-changing movement to reduce our addiction to fossil fuels.
Module 8: Going Forth
What's next in becoming effective, active creators of the future? The final Game Changer Intensive module offers a series of inspiring and practical resources including an Action Plan template to support Game Changers as they go forth. The additional on-line conference calls for European/Irish participants will focus on what we need to do in our particular environment.
Each week includes:
Approximately 1.5 hours of videos and readings (you pace your own learning during the week)
About 20 minutes of participation in on-line discussion forums (as and when you wish during the week)
A 75-minute conference call with your small group (at a regularly scheduled time each week) where you compare notes and share ideas with other participants
An additional 75-minute conference call for participants in Ireland and across Europe to link our learning and our action plans to our own regional, national, and continental environments.
What is your idea of citizenship?
To confront the challenges ahead of us, it will take nothing short of humanity rising as one to meet it. It will take not only engaged citizens, but global citizens. You can join the discussion now! Just click on this link. What comes up for you as you consider embodying a sense of global citizenship? Please share your thoughts in the response box below or post any related questions you may have.
The site for participants to get to know one another in advance of the programme: <https://connect.pachamama.org/node/541>
Go to this site if you want more general information about the Pachamama Alliance: <https://www.pachamama.org/>
More information about Pachamama global activities: <https://www.pachamama.org/engage>
Specific information and enrolment for the GCI: <https://www.pachamama.org/engage/intensive>
Direct link to Enrolment: <http://landing.pachamama.org/register-for-the-next-game-changer-intensive?hsCtaTracking=2f9ff67a-8ad7-4148-bcbb-1bda0941819f%7Cf6085dee-83ea-4e4f-9ac9-2fda6ef3863d>
Posted in Change, Climate Change, Democracy, Environment, Europe, Evolutionary Activism, Global Warming, Politics


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4 cieki wodne w Polsce
 Szeroki Potok – potok, dopływ Kalniczki
 Szeroki Potok – potok, dopływ Ostręża
 Szeroki Potok – potok, dopływ Skawy
 Szeroki Potok – potok, dopływ Jasienicy

 1 ciek wodny na Słowacji
 Szeroki Potok (słow. Široký potok) – potok, dopływ Jaworowego Potoku

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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Home/Politics/John Kelly: "Least enjoyable job I've ever had," former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly sounds off on time with Trump
John Kelly: "Least enjoyable job I've ever had," former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly sounds off on time with Trump
John Kelly, President Trump's former chief-of-staff, appeared to part ways with several of the administration's immigration policies, including Mr. Trump's promise that a "big, beautiful" wall must be built along the southern border, in a wide-ranging discussion at Duke University on Wednesday.
Kelly, who also served as Mr. Trump's Homeland Security secretary, said it's his view that "we don't need a wall from, you know, sea to shining sea." He suggested that Customs and Border Patrol agents would agree that a physical barrier in many places "seems like an awful waste of money," and appeared to question whether the crisis at the southern border needed to be deemed a national emergency at all.
"If I told them 'I can get you 2,000 miles [of wall],' they'd say 'that seems like an awful waste of money' because they don't need it everywhere is the point. So, the physical barrier in some places, many places backed up the CBP people, men and women, that have great people…and they use a great deal of technology, sensors, things like that, towers, drones. So, is it an emergency?" said Kelly.
Despite the potential logistical difficulties presented by building a wall, and the obvious legal and funding challenges he currently faces as Democrats lead an effort to block his national emergency declaration, Mr. Trump has remained firm that a wall is the only way to truly secure the border.
Kelly also appeared to disagree with Mr. Trump's view that many crossing the border illegally are "rapists" or drug dealers. "They're overwhelmingly not criminals," Kelly said Wednesday. "They're people coming up here for economic purposes. I don't blame them for that."
Kelly also wouldn't say if he fully supported Mr. Trump's national emergency declaration, explaining, "So long as [the declaration is] legal and within the authority of the president, you do it." He went on to say that he believed the national emergency issue would be "wrapped up in the courts" as it continues to face mounting legal challenges.
Kelly said, however, that the larger issue of the border "gets into the alienation and lack of bipartisanship that we seem to be crippled with." Kelly noted that in the past some Democrats had signed onto the idea of expanding physical barriers along the southern border in the early 2000s.
In response to some border states pulling back their national guard troops from the southern border, Kelly said that the military does not generally enjoy being deployed for domestic operations.
"We have a long, long tradition of fighting the away game and have real sense that except for natural disasters, to interact domestically is something that most — I would say all — military people prefer not to do," said Kelly. He added that while National Guard troops might operate drones or provide logistical support to law enforcement, "I would look for another way to do it rather than deploy federal troops on the border."
Kelly also said that the administration's decision to implement a "zero tolerance" policy of separating children from migrant parents illegally crossing the border surprised federal agencies.
"It certainly caught [Homeland Security] and [Health and Human Services] flat footed," said Kelly. The policy has since been discontinued.
And despite criticism of how they handled the care of young migrants detained along the border, Kelly argued that the administration "did the best we could."
"They do the best they can to take care in the right way but it is still a dorm-type facility and, in many ways, better than where they came from," Kelly explained of the detention facilities along the U.S-Mexico border. "So, not the best policy and I would say it caught people in the government flat-footed and we spent a fair amount of time trying to play catch up."
Looking back on his career, Kelly suggested that if the 2016 election had gone the other way, he "would have probably" agreed to serve as secretary Clinton's chief of staff.
"Politics aside, it's all about governing the country. We are in good and bad times, there's many threats around the world. Many threats socially or domestically. And love 'em or hate 'em, whoever it happens to be, once they become president, it's in our interest as a people to assist him or her as much as we can to be successful."
Here's more highlights of Kelly's conversation:
Kelly on Trump's travel ban woes: Kelly suggested that the administration bungled the travel ban policy of banning travel from places of Muslim-majority countries due to inexperience and a lack of understanding how government works. "In my view what happened was they wrote some of these policies without going through that arduous interagency process," said Kelly He said his role "simply was to best I could react to that."
Kelly has no comment on Jared Kushner security clearance controversy: "I couldn't, and I'm not dodging, and I couldn't comment for a couple reasons. One, someone's security clearance is something that I can't talk about or reveal, number two the conversation with the president at that level would certainly be covered by privilege," said Kelly of reports that the president had overruled White House officials and ordered his son-in-law Jared Kushner be given a top-secret clearance.
Kelly calls chief of staff role the "least enjoyable job I've ever had": Kelly, who has repeatedly expressed his frustrations over the inner-workings of the Trump White House, referred to his most recent employment as "the least enjoyable job I've ever had." He did say, however, that for eighteen months he "helped the administration, the president of the United States make the very best decisions that he could based on the information that we could provided him."
Abby Kingsley, a sophomore and public policy major at Duke University, contributed to this report.
What is the pancreatic cancer survival rate? Alex Trebek's diagnosis of stage 4 pancreatic cancer raises questions
Facebook takes down fake accounts in UK, Romania
Trump wants to delay census after Supreme Court ruling on citizenship question
Citizenship question will not be added to census for now, Supreme Court rules
Nancy Pelosi speaks as Senate forces border bill showdown – live stream
Supreme Court leaves partisan gerrymandering to be decided by states

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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WE THE PEOPLE 2 Titles
Too Much Noise
SC 6258CD
$13.50 LOW STOCK LEVEL
"Garage fans agree: We The People's ragin', tough-as-nails punk tracks 'Mirror of Your Mind' and 'You Burn Me Up and Down' rate among the era's best. But believe it or not, this band was capable of even more. Along with the above two hammer-down classics, Too Much Noise collates everything, the seminal -- and surprisingly diverse -- Central Florida outfit cut for the Challenge label during the band's mid-'60s heyday, including the raga-rock fave 'In The Past' (covered by the Chocolate Watchband) and the tender folk-rock ballad '(You Are) The Color of Love.' Sourced from the original analog masters, here are We the People's three scarce and essential Challenge single sides plus material recorded for the label but unreleased at the time -- all of it in raw, skull-crushing fidelity on CD and high-definition vinyl."
WOHN RECORDS
WHN 009LP
$25.00 NOT IN STOCK
"We The People, from Florida, managed to record only a handful of singles between 1966 and 1968; never had the luck to produce a hit record, but they are now regarded as one of the best non-hitmaker bands of the era, alongside other fellows like The Chocolate Watchband, The Remains, or The Music Machine. Their music was of great intensity and quality, which cannot always be said from teen garage bands, and ranging through several styles; they left us a unique collection of punk rockers like 'You Burn Me Up and Down,' 'My Brother, the Man,' 'Mirror of Your Mind' and others, although they also explored more slightly psychedelic sounds and even did some hypnotizing ballads. Long unavailable on vinyl, here's a brand new collection of their best recordings, including also the previously unreleased (on vinyl) fuzz garage soul rocker 'There's Gonna Be A Storm.'" Remastered sound and limited to 500 copies.


Online brokerage firm Samco secures fresh funding.
Online brokerage firm Samco has secured $7.5 Mn (49 crore) in series B funding round. The round was led by Samco's existing investors and a London based investment firm Bay Capital Investment Partners. The Mumbai headquartered brokerage firm's latest funding round has come after more than one and half years, after it raised $3 Mn (INR 20 Cr) in 2016.
The startup intends to use the latest capital infusion to build new business verticals including mutual fund distribution and advisory business.
Commenting about the funding round, Siddharth Mehta (founder, Bay Capital Investment) stated that their decision to invest in Samco was propelled by the fact that the startup has shown an impressive growth trajectory since its inception and also its ability to deliver unique solutions for customers.
Samco was incorporated in 2015 with an idea to offer online brokerage solutions to customers. With stock trading still restricted to minuscule population, Samco aims to make stock trading easy for people. It provides discount broking and depository services, commodities discount broking as well as several non-banking services.
The startup also hasn't shied from leveraging breakthrough technologies like artificial intelligence and data analytics in order to offer its customers deeper insight into market conditions and thereby help them in making better buying decisions.
Buoyed by technological growth, the Fintech industry has witnessed impressive growth over the years. The main proponents of this growth have been VC firms and angel investors, who have reposed faith by investing millions in this young and nascent industry.
Even though majority of Fintech industry is been dominated by online loan lenders but online brokerage firms like Samco have certainly benefitted from the ongoing Fintech boom.
Experts claim that the future of startups like Samco and its competitors is quite bright as today people and corporates are steadily flocking towards stock investment for impressive returns.


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NBA Draft Lottery
Pistons NBA Draft
Pistons lottery results: Losing pick 'not disastrous,' says Stan Van Gundy
The Detroit Pistons entered the NBA draft lottery with a greater than 82 percent chance of keeping their first-round pick. As they soon learned, though, 82 is less than 100.
By Matt Watson May 20, 2014, 9:46pm EDT
Share All sharing options for: Pistons lottery results: Losing pick 'not disastrous,' says Stan Van Gundy
Gregory Shamus
The Detroit Pistons experienced the worst-case scenario at the NBA draft lottery, losing their top-8 protected pick to the Charlotte Hornets after the dastardly Cleveland Cavaliers leapfrogged all the way from No. 9 to first overall. It's the third time in four years the Cavaliers have secured the No. 1 pick.
(Maybe the third time's the charm and they won't be awful anymore? Nah, they'll just win it again in 2016. But I digress ...)
While fans of the team may be upset, jaded and annoyed, newly appointed team president and head coach Stan Van Gundy is doing his best to project a feeling of optimism. "Tonight's results are disappointing, but not disastrous," he said in a statement released by the team. "We knew we would lose our pick this year or next.
"We have the 38th pick and we will continue our evaluation process and preparation for the upcoming draft. We'll also explore other opportunities to use the draft to improve our team -– whether that's moving up, moving down or staying at No. 38. We still have many assets and tools at our disposal to upgrade our roster, including the upcoming free agency period in July."
The Pistons have a lot of decisions to make this summer -- first and foremost, what to do with restricted free agent Greg Monroe, who's seeking a max contract. But if the Pistons hope to move up in the draft, it can't involve any type of sign-and-trade with Monroe, who, like all players not officially under contract, are ineligible to be moved on draft day.
Also out of the picture is packaging next year's first-round pick in a trade to move up in this year's draft, since NBA teams are prohibited from trading first-round picks in consecutive years. But anyone else on the roster? They're fair game. (Well, everyone not named "Andre.") In what's been universally hailed as the deepest NBA draft in years, it'll be very interesting to see if Van Gundy attempts to move up or focus his energies on free agency.
Now your thoughts.
NBA draft lottery results: Pistons lose first-round pick, will draft 38th overall
Cavs select Andrew Wiggins No. 1 overall
Van Gundy: Losing pick 'not disastrous'
Pistons fall in draft, send pick to Charlotte


Wednesfield Canal Festival 2019 – It is very early days, but planning has been taking place already for this event this year, with some really good content already agreed.
I will be meeting with representatives of 'Hands on Wednesfield' later today to brief them of the progress already made in creating this years event.
Plus there will be a hand over cheque presented to the charity The Canal and River Trust.
Please place August 10 and 11th in your diary! This will be a great Festival this year, one where the family will have a great time. You will not want to miss it!