Patrick Comerford
This blog reached yet another new peak late last night (17 June 2025), totalling up 13 million hits since I first began blogging about 15 years ago, back in 2010.
Yet again, I find this is both a humbling statistic and a sobering figure that leaves me not with a sense of achievement but a feeling of gratitude to all who read and support this blog and my writing.
After I began blogging, it took almost two years until July 2012 to reach half a million readers. It was over a year before this figure rose to 1 million by September 2013. It climbed steadily to 2 million, June 2015; 3 million, October 2016; 4 million, November 2019; 5 million, March 2021; 6 million, July 2022; 7 million, 13 August 2023; 8 million, April 2024; and 9 million, October 2024.
But the rise in the number of readers has been phenomenal over the past few months, reaching 9.5 million on 4 January 2025, 10 million over a week later (12 January 2025), 10.5 million two days after that (14 January 2025), 11 million a month later (12 February 2025), 11.5 million a month after that (10 March 2025), 12 million early last month (3 May 2025), 12.5 million a month later (6 June 2025) and 13 million shortly before midnight last night (17 June 2025).
Indeed, January 2025 was the first month this blog ever had 1 million hits in one single month – or even within a fortnight – with 1 million hits by mid-January, in the early hours of 14 January, and a total of 1,420,383 by the end of that month (31 January 2025).
In recent months, the daily figures have been overwhelming on occasions. Seven of the 12 days of busiest traffic on this blog were in January 2025 alone, and the other five of those 12 busiest days were in this month (June 2025):
• 289,076 (11 January 2025)
• 285,366 (12 January 2025)
• 261,422 (13 January 2025)
• 100,291 (10 January 2025)
• 64,077 (14 January 2025)
• 55,614 (17 June 2025)
• 55,344 (25 January 2025)
• 52,831 (27 January 2025)
• 48,819 (15 June 1015)
• 46,920 (7 June 2025)
• 46,420 (8 June 2025)
• 46,042 (14 June 2025)
This blog has already had about 3.6 million hits this year, almost 28 per cent of all hits ever, by 6 pm this evening (18 June 2025) it had almost 49,000 hits.
Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22, ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.’ But I have noticed that seven of these days were in the week before and after Trump’s inauguration, the others were in the days around his outrageous military prade in Washington DC on 14 June and that the overwhelming number of hits are not from Ireland, the UK and Greece, as I might expect, but from the US.
The bots at work in Washington must be trawling far and wide for anyone critical of the Trump regime, but I doubt my criticisms of Trump, Vance and Musk are going to make it easy to get a visa to visit the US over the next four years, should I ever want to under the present regime. I’d prefer to boos my ego and cnvince myself that my popularity is growing and that I have become a ‘must-read’ writer for so many people every day. But, sadly, I don’t think that’s so. And if a minor critic of the Trump regime outside the US such as me is being intimidated, imagine how many critics inside the US feel they are being intimidated and bullied into success.
With this latest landmark figure of 13 million hits by today, over 1.4 million hits in January alone, and almost three quarters of a million hits during June so far, I once again find myself asking questions such as:
• What do 13 million people look like?
• Where do we find 13 million people?
• What does £13 million, €13 million or $13 million mean, or what would it buy?
13 million or more people in the UK are disabled, from dyspraxia to impaired vision to Tourette’s.
It is estimated that there are about 13 million undocumented migrants in the US.
Burundi has a population of over 13 million people, and cities with a population of about 13 million people include Rio de Janeiro, Tianjin and Kinshasa.
There are have been protests throughout southern Europe about the over-tourism. About 13 million tourists visit Venice each year, 13 million tourists visited Berlin and the island of Mallorca last year (2024), Cyprus is expecting 13 million tourists this year, and already 13 million tourists have visited Hanoi and Thailand this year. Twice that number of tourists, 26 million, are said to have visited Barcelona, last year.
Greece is more than 13 million hectares in size, with a total land area of 13.2 ha, and has a coastline of 13.6 million metres (13,676 km), the ninth longest coastine in the world.
Greenland is melting at a rate of 13 million litres per second. That’s the equivalent volume of water in five Olympic pools discharged each second into the ocean.
Each year about 13 million hectares of the world’s forests are lost due to deforestation.
The number of olive trees in Crete vary in estimates from 13 million up to 30 million. The export value of California olives and olive oil is $13 million.
Lichfield District Council spends £13 million a year on local services.
Jeff Bezsos and Lauren Sanchez plan to spend $13 million on their ‘scaled-back’ wedding in Venice, with ‘a nice small gathering of 200 people’.
Each year about 13 million hectares of the world’s forests are lost due to deforestation (Patrick Comerford)
Saifullah Abdullah Paracha from Pakistan was held without charge by the US in Guantanamo Bay for over 18 years before being released in 2022. He had interesting perspectives on $13 million when he wrote for Reprieve back in January 2020:
‘I was surprised to hear President Donald Trump complaining about the $13 million that the US spends per detainee each year, to detain us without charge at Guantánamo Bay. It is difficult to think what they spend it on. Certainly, it is not spent on us. They do not need $13 million to close my cell door on me or to send me out into a shingle compound to walk in circles for an hour. I have diabetes, arthritis, and get chest pains that are clear warnings of my mortality, but they certainly do not spend $13 million on my healthcare. I have had two heart attacks and I fear it will not be third time lucky.
‘They don’t spend the money on the guards either. I have tried to befriend many soldiers over the years, as I feel sorry for them. They are little better off than we are. They are told we are the worst of the worst terrorists in the world, and that they are being sent here to do the job for which they enlisted – to make America safe. When they get here, they discover a bunch of nobodies – an old Pakistani businessman like me, a Karachi taxi driver like Ahmed, or Abdul Latif who was meant to have been on a plane home at the end of the Obama Administration. Trump has sworn he will not transfer anyone. We are “no value” forever-detainees, marooned here on a presidential whim.
‘Is it any surprise that soldiers here reportedly suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) at a rate twice as high as those on the battlefield? At least the latter are doing the job they signed up for. Here, the guards find that they are not fighting, or even serving, the country they thought was America. Instead, they are riddled with doubt as to the meaning of their lives. I don’t get any therapy here for the abuses and the losses I have suffered, but I do find myself doling out advice to soldiers in their teens or early twenties who are psychologically lost. The S.O.G. is the Sergeant of the Guard in our camp. They call me O.G., which I am told stands for “Old Granddad”. One guard even ended up calling me “Father.”
‘My lawyer asked me what I would rather spend my $13 million on. I tell him, forget the $13 million, and just give me a boarding pass for the plane back to my family.
‘If I am not allowed that, first I ask why the American people would want to waste their tax dollars. So far they have spent $6 billion on this prison that has made nobody more safe and severely damaged the USA’s reputation as a country founded on the rule of law. My best estimate is that this could have saved the lives of 100,000 Americans – if it had been spent on health care, rather than torture.
‘Yet when pressed and told I must spend it all, I do not find that hard. It is what I used to do when I was a wealthy businessman, and had money myself. I do feel a duty to thank those who have helped me over many years, so I would donate $1 million to Reprieve to continue their good work. The rest I would invest in Pakistan, to help people to love life rather than cast it away on “jihad”. I have calculated that for each $1.5 million, I could create a hospital within a sustainable community – 200 families with jobs on the premises, a school, a fruit orchard and a hive of honey bees. It may sound impossible for that kind of sum, but it is Pakistan, where money goes much further. Indeed, I have written up an entire business plan which I call the “Milk and Honey Project.”
‘Imagine – or help America’s leaders to imagine – how much goodwill this would buy. Remember, also, that this is just the money being wasted on keeping one old man locked up. There are more than twenty “no value” detainees like me held in this dreadful prison, at an annual cost to the US taxpayer of over $250 million. I must agree with the President: it is a “crazy” waste of money. A man who so often boasts about getting a good deal should recognise that it is about time he stopped throwing the money away.’
Saifullah Abdullah Paracha is reortedly back Pakistan; Donald Trump is disgracefully back in the White House.
The world has a population of 8.2 billion people, and 13 million people represent only 0.16% of all those people, a modest number I suppose.
One of the most warming figures personally in the midst of all these statistics is the one that shows my morning prayer diary continues to reach an average of 73-75 people each day in the past month. It is over three years now since I retired from active parish ministry. But I think many of my priest-colleagues would be prayerfully thankful if the congregations in their churches averaged or totalled 510 to to 530 people a week.
Today, I am very grateful to all 13 million readers and viewers of this blog to date, and for the small and faithful core group among you who join me in prayer, reading and reflection each morning.
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