Pope announces retirement, Lightning strikes the vatican.

[seesthru]

Eerie, huh? THere is a picture online of a lightning bolk striking the vatican not long after the Pope announced he was stepping down.

[seesthru]

Popes and lightning, meteors exploding, comets, asteroids, tsunamis, volcanoes. It is starting to look like Larua Means' visions

[Earthnut]

Not only do they "look" like Lara's visions, but now we're beginning to understand them. Now that's eerie.

Here's the picture ~

[Libby]

I like coincidences like this. That building has probably been struck thousands of times before, but it's pretty amazing it gets struck just hours later, and when there's an expert photographer with a very good camera and filming from the right spot. If that event had formed part of a Hollywood movie plot, people would think it was contrived, e.g. deus ex machina.

A lot of people think that the lightning strike had some kind of meaning. But in most cases where lightning hits a tall(ish) structure, including tall trees, there's two parts to the lightning strike. One is a leader that reaches down from the clouds, and the other is a streamer which reaches up from a structure. If those two connect – bang!

So, if the lightning strike was significant, which part of it? The down from the cloud, or the up from the ground?

It's an amazing photograph, though.

[seesthru]

Given that the media is all on about how the Pope stepped down and is being given asylum to prevent prosecution for his part in the sex abuse cover-ups, I'd have to say, top down, unless lightning is a sign of the pleasure of the evil one. Love the pic. I'm not 100 percent sure of the thruthfulness of the story. However if it is true, it's eerie.

I hope you will all pardon my many typos. I am not drunk, I promise. I am simply trying to type faster than my sausage fingers can keep up with.

I am often ( very recently) kind of frightened by how the show MIllennium seems much more relevant today than when it aired. I know we have always had antural disasters, and massacres, and serial killers, and intrigue and all the stuff they dealt with, but it comes faster and more frequent with each passing day. The show left air before r 9/11 before the horrors that came after the horror. I thhink if I had Frank Black's gift, my head would have long since exploded in overload.

[Libby]

Don't worry about typos. What you've typed makes sense, and that's all that matters. (And, you didn't use that dreaded txt spk, which I personally can't abide, so you get a thumbs-up from me.)

I know that the internet has made us all more aware of what's happening around us and further afield, and that does make it look as though the world is becoming more dangerous place. And yet we're told that it's actually becoming safer; that the number of violent crimes is decreasing. There's a UK government report into violent crime statistics that's published yearly. The last one indicated that the number of murders in the UK was decreasing - yet that's not the impression I get from the news these days.

But, then, it may be that much more effective police and legal procedures are just revealing what was already there but ignored. Child abuse and domestic violence is much more likely to be taken seriously these days. In the UK, there's a current investigation into the apparently wide-spread abuse of young girls and boys, which started as an investigation into a now-deceased media person and possibly others. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yewtree.

There's also been a recent report into the Magdelene Laundries in Ireland. Those were institutions that "fallen women", i.e. mostly those who had children out of wedlock, were sent, often for the rest of their days. They were institutions run by nuns, and many people who sent their laundry there were under the impression that it was the nuns who did the laundry, whereas it was those girls and women who had no choice but to be not much more than slaves. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_laundries. As an aside: the Irish constitution prevents the adoption of children born to married couples, even if the parents are willing.

Every time I think about the Millennium episode "Monster", I'm reminded about the satanic abuse cases that occurred here in the UK, prompted by a paediatrician who had seen a presentation given by a US "expert" and just took the basics and ran with it. At one point, the hospital where she had her clinic was over-run by the admission of all the children she had assessed as being "abused". That triggered other cases of children being taken into care. It took a long while for all those cases to be investigated and dismissed. But, in the meantime, families had been disrupted, and some of those children were permanently scarred by their experiences at the hand of the "experts".

I'm not sure how Frank would react to what's going on the world today, but that's probably because I'm not sure whether we're seeing an increase in the worst of what humankind can do, or whether we're seeing an uncovering of past abuses at long last.

[seesthru]

I'm not a fan of text speak either.

I think, if we are talking season 3 Frank Black, he would do his best to understand that it's not secret societies and end of the world stuff, just daily life and increasing media coverage. Season 2 Frank would probably be all twisted up and even more desperate to get answers to protect his family.

I watched a Magdalene laundries video. Scary stuff. And the satanic ritual abuse flap? Yeah, that episode from "Millennium" was ased on a real story here in the US The McMartin pre school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial

Only, in that one, the monster was hysteria.

Abuse of all types has gone on since time began I think. I hope we can bring to light the extent of it all. HUman trafficking is such a problem, even here in the US. Child abuse and neglect too.

Shoot, here in Pensacola? We have a higher per capita homicide rate than New York City currently. That's not a good statistic! I'm not sure what they are putting in the water!