Céad Fáilte romhat! is é do bheatha
A thousand Welcomes to The Village Oak Tree for May 15th, 2024
I am Terrance Ó Domhnaill, and I am returning to your village again with that interview I teased everyone about the last couple of weeks.
I have on today’s show, a young man from the west coast who has written a book called, “Final Bible Study” and he gives his name as AMS Esquire on the book. He talks a little more about himself in the podcast.
The podcast went to just under an hour and we had some lively discussions on Christian theology, Islam and a little about the eastern orthodox Christian church. Also a lot about the ancient Israelites and their adventures when their God said to Abraham that the land past the river was theirs as long as they didn’t break the covenant with him. Which for people who know their Jewish history, they broke that many times throughout their history and were punished. They are breaking it now in Gaza so will their God punish the Jews once again?
I don’t want to get into discussing the Palestinians here as I am saving that for next week. I will give you a little teaser though. I am continuing my series on the failing empire of the United States. I have a good article that I will read from Michael Campi and a poem about the dead Palestinians from a writer I just subscribed to on Substack from Northern Ireland. Her name is Ramona McCloskey. Her Substack page is called “Stone, Soil and Soul.”
If everything goes right tomorrow, I will have another interview with a young man who aspires to be an activist. I will be talking to him tomorrow to find out just how much. If we agree to an interview, I will post it in two weeks.
Click play above to watch this weeks podcast episode. I saved the short veterans PSA for the end of the interview this time so as not to take away from our discussion. Again, I remind everyone that this podcast is also available on nearly all major podcast mobile apps, if you want to listen to an audio version from your phone or iPad.
In other news, I have been very active on Substack’s social media of late, exercising my right to free speech for as long as I still have it. This new terrorism bill, HR 6090, that was passed by the House of Representatives to punish people for expressing any anti-Semitism speech in the United States, may curtail a lot of us in our first amendment rights or incur a visit from the U.S. version of the Gestapo or GRU.
It has yet to be passed by the Senate. I hope they can see common sense and trash this for the stupidity that it is but I won’t get my hopes up. Not with the pro-Israel congress the U.S. has now. Genocide Joe will most certainly sign it if it makes it to his desk. More bad news for students and other activists.
I have been advocating online for more student protests in their desire to make colleges and Uni’s be more transparent about who their donors are and make them stop supporting Israel’s war machine. A ceasefire for Gaza is paramount right now to allow humanitarian aid in.
I continue to muddle along using my platforms to decry the injustices all around us everyday. There certainly is plenty of ammunition for my media cannon.
I will never be as good a journalist as the likes of Chris Hedges, Mehdi Hasan, and the brave Al Jazeera journalists who have given their lives to report to the world the atrocities in Gaza. All I can do is add my voice to the chatter and hope I can reach someone who will listen.
I am now hooked on YouTube videos about the wars across the world, and journalists who are doing there best to report the truth, despite all of the efforts to shut them down. I now get my news from independent writers and newscasters from Substack and YouTube. I have no trust at all in anything any of the U.S. mainstream news outfits pass on to the public.
Anything they report is written for them by the Biden administration now, by way of the Israeli lobby. This is the other debate going on around the world. What can the world expect from the U.S. after November? More misery is the consensus. The U.S. has nowhere to turn anymore. A choice between overspending genocidal democrats or a wannabe fascist criminal, with a ultra-right party supporting him that wants to turn the United States into a Christian theocracy.
I will have more to say about all of this in future podcasts.
There are quite a few times these days when I reflect on my decision to remain in the U.S. back in 2010. I came very close to taking a trip to Ireland that year for a vacation and I might have only returned long enough to pack my kit. I was single then with little to hold me in the U.S. and a little restless. I backed out at the last minute, but now I wonder, did I do the right thing?
Now, I have too much invested in real estate in the U.S. to go, plus Ireland is suffering from a massive shortage of housing and health care. Sometimes the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence.
But I still wonder if I shouldn’t have chucked the U.S. and gone back to the land of my immigrant ancestors to become a gentleman gardener or something. I guess I will never know whether chasin’ after the fae up in the mountains would have been a better deal or not. I can dream though.
That is all I have. I hope you will return again to the village meeting place next week to see what I have come up with for you. As a Seanchaí, I want to be your bringer of news from the outside world for a bit as you do your best to survive another day.
Share this with your friends. This newsletter may be paywalled here but it is free to read on my website at www.crann-na-beatha.com in the blog.
As I say good bye this week, I wish to leave you with this Irish blessing as you go about your day. “May your blessings outnumber the shamrocks that grow and may trouble avoid you wherever you go.” Slán go fóill. Sláinte
T. Ó Domhnaill — Gaelic Seanchaí
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