Harrowgate Tales - Excerpts

My latest on Kindle - Harrowgate Tales


Excerpts:


Parade in Kensington - Harrowgate Memorial Day Parade


...The biggest event annually in Harrowgate - Kensington was the Memorial Day Parade being that most parents of school aged children in the neighborhood and areas were veterans of WWII and Korea. Old males likely vets of WWI etc. I once marched in Memorial Day Parades in high school with the North(east) Catholic High marching band of which I played Sousaphone.

One performance I personally remember was in a parade that was in Port Richmond, we were bused to different locations that day in a P.T.C. chartered bus. There I saw two amazing things. An old man of about ninety, skinny and tall and wearing what looked like a Boy Scout Uniform with some medals and looking through thick as the bottom of a Coke bottle lenses of his eyeglasses. This old guy was an actual Veteran of the Spanish American War. Small world. There too, this is the late 60's, I saw my English teacher from freshman year who at that time was a seminarian studying to be a priest, teaching on a year long sabbatical of sorts, teaching in our high school for a year, after finishing four years of college in the seminary before continuing with an additional four years of seminary training after this year of teaching. It was after all a teaching religious order and his salary from the archdiocese doubt went to support the order. 

He was no longer in a black cassock but in a white tee shirt, shorts and sandals. She was also with what must have been his girlfriend. He saw me during a break from marching and said hello with no other explanation other than to say hello and ask how Junior year was going etc. I guess he left the seminary for one reason, reasons or another etc. ...


The Long Dark Corridor

...I guess that the religious order had decided to maintain the property until it could be evaluated whether to sell it - use it, convert it etc. I think that maybe about fifteen priests and seminarians used the grand estate as a second faculty house - to relieve overcrowding in the primary faculty house – and commuting by car back and forth to the high school. 

In retrospect I connect some dots (possibly in total error) and perhaps it was the gay section of the original faculty house that went into separate quarters at this white elephant mansion.

Oh this speculation breaks down into two categories: good gays, abstaining from gay sex religious and the bad gays - actually occasionally practicing their natural instincts -

There is not much to this story except for connecting dots and wondering. In the middle of that sophomore year, a young, dynamic, charismatic seminarian teacher died in a car crash coming back from some long distance weekend duties - deacon at some parish etc. I remember his picture in the newspaper and the official speculation that he had fallen asleep at the wheel of his car in this "single vehicle collision" - And then my biology teacher, I liked him, died during the summer break.

I suppose I would not be writing this today except that in the next school year, my junior year, a very prissy but not unlikable priest blurted out something in class. Father Tom, a history teacher, said something like a veiled admission regarding the sudden tragic death of Father Ed, the biology teacher. He said something like "wrapping oneself around a highway pillar was indeed a suspicious thing to happen" while talking to the class one day, I think his comments went over many students heads... 

Chapter Two - The Long Dark Corridor

...But I got the A+++.  Been there.  Done that.  Time to move on. Etc. 

I decided then and there. I would drop his course. So much of what he had fed this class so far was his own personal bullshit full of his ambitious plan to one day run the school system downtown which he in fact did one day. I have since read many things about cults and brainwashing and such and “E.” would have made a great Jim Jones in the secular world etc. IMHO. 

I also as I have written this blog for many years have to wonder how ambitious church lady types with penises, how they rise to the top of their professions being perhaps tops and not giving a shit about who gets ground into sausage along the way, especially children.

I also have  to wonder how “E.” built his great education system as the archdiocese, one by one, shut down their inner city schools and high schools.  That glory sometimes is a story, a press release, as the world and or institution dies from attrition.  

Will the last person in the Archdiocese Education Office at “222” kindly turn off the lights as they leave the building forever. 

I also have to wonder how many times how the elites of the Education Department rubbed elbows with the Elites of the hierarchy at board meetings or gatherings over cocktails and how polite church talk and education talk never got mixed with the very real talk of child abuse and criminal cover up emanating from the Cardinal’s penthouse office suite on the top floor above?...

Speadsheet Bible Sliced and Diced Into Statistics and Profits for The New Ignorant Classes in America Courtesy of the Oligarchs, FOX NEWS, GOP etc.

Spreadsheet Bible Jesus Riding Pet Dinosaur "Spike"

Of course you cannot deny the existence of the bones of Dinosaurs, but since the Earth is only 6,000 Years Old in a Perfect Market Economy Capitalist world, and you are on your own foraging for food and seeking shelter under decaying infrastructure underpasses etc., it is highly likely that Jesus, who defends Free Market Capitalism rode a Dinosaur according to homeschooled children's coloring books. 

Jesus would not take a grimy little poor people's socialist funded bus to his preaching gigs. He saved up and used a Cadillac Chariot.

Jesus looked ahead, invested with his local financial adviser in a 401K heavily leveraged into a hedge fund, looking forward to a fat retirement fund.

He believed in this, in the hope that God would bless him and lift him out of his poverty if God thought he deserved it. 

This in case his dad did not ask him to commit joint Patricide/Regicide/Suicide and save everybody from hell etc.

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2014/02/spreadsheetization-of-bible-in-global.html

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American Catholic Bishops Continue to Practice Sexual McCarthyism – Bundling Gay Hate With So-Called Christian Love

They, the Bankers and the Brokers, bundled bad mortgages together with good mortgages and sold the bundled mess as good securities. The global financial meltdown happened in 2008 and nobody really has had to pay unless you lost your job, your house, your family, your dignity and or your life by natural cause or other means.

Little people don’t matter on the scale of things anymore – the Wharton Global Spreadsheet and all that.

Cedric Tornay - Vatican’s Lee Harvey Oswald? - Swiss Guards Murder Coverup?

Cedric Tornay - Murderer or Hierarchy Scapegoat?

Warning: This a not a conspiracy theory but it is, as I favor things in studying history, a timeline thing that may or may shed some light on a chain of events on that timeline, events that may or may not be as they officially seem. 

http://www.phillymag.com/articles/catholics_in_crisis_sex_and_deception_in_the_archdiocese_of_philadelphia/page6   Page 6-7

Yet there are whispers that even timid Justin Rigali may have gotten into a bit of hot water in Rome. He was working as secretary of the Congregation for Bishops, which is the number two position in the second-most important congregation in the Vatican; that congregation recommends candidates for bishop. 

The secretary almost always serves at least five years. But Rigali was moved out after four years and one month—that’s when he was sent to St. Louis, to oversee the archdiocese there. One theory has it that Rigali may have gotten too aggressive in pushing his choices for bishops—that he might have, in other words, crossed someone in the Vatican with enough power to undermine his career. 

There are also repeated, though unsubstantiated, rumors—ones cited by several Vatican or Rigali observers I spoke to—that there might have been another reason he left Rome. While at the Vatican, Rigali became chaplain for the Swiss Guards, the ex-military guys, young and unmarried, who provide security there. Uncharacteristic of a man dedicated to carefully building a Vatican career, Rigali befriended them, drank with them, and was involved with them to an extent that appeared unseemly to many. “Princes of the Church do not drink with the hired help,” one longtime Vatican observer says. (The archdiocese also said it will not dignify questions about Rigali and the Swiss Guards with a response.)

In 1999, in frail health and on his way home from Mexico, Pope John Paul II would make an unprecedented stop in St. Louis to see his long-time Vatican worker bee. It seemed to be a clear message: You are still one of us.

The cardinal, now 76, appears to want to get back to Rome—where his gray presence is suited for behind-the-scenes work. “He runs off to Rome every two weeks,” says a local priest who worked in the archdiocese’s office and got to know Rigali when both of them were at the Vatican two decades ago. “His work there is more important to him than here—it’s a terrible thing for the parishioners and clergy.” Many observers believe that the Vatican will soon find someone new to run the Philadelphia archdiocese. 

Clinton, JPII, Rigali, St. Louis January 1999

http://www.catholicsupply.com/pope/pope1.html

St. Louis' Archbishop Justin Rigali announced the visit (John Paul II) to the St. Louis media on Thursday, April 22, 1998.

Cedric Tornay, Gladys Meza (Estermann), Alois Estermann

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2057916/Pope-told-investigate-Vatican-murder-suicide-amid-claims-cover-up.html

A murder-suicide (May 4,1998) involving the Swiss Guard that rocked the Vatican in a mystery worthy of a Dan Brown thriller is back in the spotlight after Pope Benedict XVI was asked to intervene and reopen the case.

Swiss Guard Cedric Tornay, 23, shot dead the famous unit's commanding officer Alois Estermann, 43, and his wife Gladys Meza before turning the gun on himself - allegedly in a fit of rage after being overlooked for promotion.

Within hours of the triple deaths in 1998 - the first violent deaths on Vatican soil in decades - officials closed the case saying it was a simple case of corporal Tornay having gone mad after being given medication for a brain tumour.

…Mr Brossellett added that he had found 'inconsistencies' in the official autopsy report provided by the Vatican after they had a second one carried out in Lausanne when the body was returned to his native Switzerland.

…He said:'Our autopsy showed that Cedric Tornay was turned at the time of the shot but the Vatican one said he was on his knees and facing forward. So their reconstruction is wrong.'

Mr Brossellett also said that they had discovered the night of the murders a friend of Estermann's had called his apartment and had heard 'bangs and shouting' and that he thought four people were in the house at the time of the killings.

Mrs Baudat said:'As far as I am concerned the original investigation is full of lies and contradictions and was carried out at such a speed so as to hide the real truth. It was a murder carried out to get Estermann out of the way and then helpfully blame it on a dead madman.'

    ----------------------------

(No doubt when Cardinal Law dropped the ball in Boston in 2002 and the bigger picture of institutional abuse and cover up became apparent nationwide, John Paul II was eager to appoint a loyal soldier, Rigali, who may have owed JPII a Vatican favor or two or three (?), to keep a lid on the Krol/Bevilacqua abuse cover-ups in Philly.  While John Paul II owed little to Bevilacqua, he owed his very papacy directly to John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia.)

John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia - King Maker

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2011/04/john-paul-ii-king-maker-edward-piszek.html

Now we have the Monsignor Lynn Child Endangerment trial going on currently in Philadelphia. Etc. One thing follows another? 

So it goes.

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Miramonte Elementary L.A. – Lockdown – 88 Teachers 40 Support Staff Removed in Growing Child Abuse Case

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/02/07/entire-staff-la-school-to-be-removed-after-teachers-arrested-on-sex-charges/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/07/los-angeles-miramonte-school-removes-faculty

The entire teaching staff has been suspended at Miramonte elementary school in Los Angeles, where two teachers have been arrested on suspicion of sexually abusing children.

The Los Angeles school superintendent, John Deasy, announced the extraordinary move, telling parents that replacement teachers would be taking over classrooms and psychiatric social workers would be placed with each class to help students and staff.

Miramonte teacher Mark Berndt was charged last week with committing lewd acts on 23 children, while Martin Springer was arrested on Friday suspected of abusing two girls in his classroom.

Berndt, who worked at the school for 32 years, abused children of ages six to 10 between 2005 and 2010, it is alleged. The acts cited by authorities include blindfolding children in a classroom and feeding them his semen in what children were allegedly told was a tasting game.

Berndt, 61, remains jailed on $23m (£14m) bail and could face life in prison if convicted. Springer, 49, is being held on $2m bail.

Springer taught at Miramonte for his entire career, which started in 1986, the district said. He taught second grade. The school board is scheduled to discuss firing him in a closed-door meeting on Tuesday.

Investigators said they knew of no connection between the Miramonte cases, though the Los Angeles Times said Berndt and Springer knew each other and had taken their classes on at least two joint field trips in the past decade.

More than a quarter of the students at Miramonte were absent on Monday while parents demanded more protection at the school.

About three dozen parents and supporters protested in front of the main doors of the school, some carrying a banner that read: "We the parents demand our children be protected from lewd teacher acts."

Maria Jimenez, 51, said the parents whose children are enrolled at Miramonte were divided over the removal of the entire staff. "Some are in favour. Others are against it because they did this without advising us or consulting us," Jimenez said.

This on top of the strange tale of teacher suicide Rigoberto Ruelas in Sept 2010 at the same heavily Hispanic Miramonte school resulting from the Los Angeles Times printing teacher ratings at its news site.  

http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2010/09/rigoberto_ruelas_missing_teach.php

What ratings did the two pervs arrested have?

And is California’s definition of ”lewd behavior toward children” an obsolete 18^th terminology like the recent sex abuse scandal at Penn State University?

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Faisal Shahzad – human drone terrorist fails (this time)

The act of desperation in the middle east to is convince people that God or Allah is on your side and have those stupid souls commit a suicide bombing to die for a political/religious cause. This is part of the equation of ignorance and poverty we are fighting in the midst of the mess over there.

In a global sense we cannot walk away from a global situation that has manifested itself since 911.

Jimmy Carter started to tell us to stop our dependence on foreign oil in the late seventies. Congress, corrupt from oil money, has not followed through on a plausible energy policy since.

The growing oil slick and cancer on the environment in the Gulf of Mexico is coming home to haunt our inactions for decades. As a result, we are drawn into the corrupt Saudi and Muslim world politics of unknown places on the other side of the planet.

These acts of so called martyrdom or heroics that we see elsewhere are coming closer to us.

Except for the jihadist US Army officer shrink Nidal Hasan, the U.S. has been very lucky since 911 in terms of avoiding direct terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

I see a long distance pattern to these so called sleeper cells in the U.S.. While a Shahzad or a Hasan are already here, they in essence have to turn on the hand that feeds them here in the United States and try to connect to some native roots elsewhere for encouragement in their acts of mass murder or attempted mass murder.

The Christian west long ago made suicide a taboo for individuals while directly and indirectly blessing wholesale warfare in it place.

At latest news, the economy going south may have contributed to Shahzad souring on his piece of the American Dream.

Long distance is someone or some group trying to pull off a complicated bomb construction and bomb detonation here in America. The people such as the underwear bomber at Christmas or the Times Square attempted bomber - they did not succeed in that long distance connection from some ancient culture and religious hate thing overseas.

People that blow themselves up in Iraq and Afghanistan are poor and certain that their reward is in Paradise with the Prophet.

Foreign born people who live here, are educated here and have opportunities here are perhaps contaminated by our secular culture that chooses life over death.

That to drive into Times Square, perhaps playing some Timothy McVeigh like tape in your head, and walking away from a half assed built bomb and to save your half assed half American life is a flaw in the present evolving equation of hate, terror and mass murder.

To be young and stupid like this Times Square suspect is to be ideal and zealous in your hate against the U.S. even while you want your cake (life) and eat it too like an American.

This is really a screwed up equation of modern proportions on the domestic and international global world stage. I hope this is a temporary scenario in the ongoing long term march to the future.

912 Soluion in Texas Airplane Suicide?

Before the dopes in the media start to analyze the recent suicide bomber flyhing into an office building in Austin Texas, let me say a few things.

A person’s suicide is evidence of distress within that individual after the fact. There are many signs that few bother to notice before the fact of death.

I am not going to mention this man’s name. I do not know it nor do I know the names of the innocent victims he decided in his agitated state to take so violently with him.

The suicide note per say is also a manifesto or rants not unlike the US Declaration of Independence against good King George.

The rhetoric of this suicide bomber is something I hear reverberated on the for profit Murdock NEWS network everyday which I do not watch (am only an occasional tourist to that carnie sideshow of humanity and “news”).

So you have a troubled man in mid life crisis, no job, a very bad economy, and a healthcare system that rations aid to the middle aged especially in the mental health aspect. (40% of a decent European style healthcare model is all the thieves and lunatics in Washington can come up with? 40% is better than nothing you damn rubes!)

The only solution has to do with the me, me, me of the Me generation and you take your queues from the insane jihadists gliding into history and into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It is all rather fucked up like the state of the American psyche these days.

The 912 solution of violence against the government as advocated by the likes of Lonesome Rhodes Beck/Murdock and company is manifesting itself. It is not a solution. It is a symptom of a really half-assed mismanagement of government and corporations and individual lives situation.

My sound bite is now over. I turn the mike back over to the media.

Suicide Virgin Humper Tries to Blow up Plane in Detroit

Some fool Arab wanted to blow up a passenger plane over Detroit. You say he isn’t Arab. The money for this Al-Qaeda bullshit is from Arabia – that is all I have to know.

Christ! You blow up a plane over Detroit, who would notice – it’s Detroit!

And to kill two hundred and eighty odd strangers plus crew for some weird religion – bizarre. Human sacrifice is obsolete - it is the sign of a very primitive superstitious idol worshipping religion. And I thought American Fundamentalists were weird. Religious weirdoes of the world – get your heads out of your asses!

There are an awful lot of lonely Muslim guys in desperate need of virgins in Paradise out there that want to blow up other people in order to get at the real good out of this world stuff.

I am sick and tired of foreigners who come into a country, eat our food, use our institutions of higher education and then leave with a bad attitude or chip on their shoulder and want to blame us for their failings and inadequacies as a people or as part of a culture.

Apparently the worshipers of the Prophet guy who think they are superior and just don’t get western civilization had better sit down and think twice if they want to live on my planet.

Freud or some other lunatic said it best when you can peg these guys as transferring all their hostilities they have for their parents, their native culture, their native land or native religion and do not have the courage to challenge what is wrong there and come over here to punish us for their inferior local culture.

You don’t see us running over there to eat their food, use their institutions of higher learning etc. What is wrong with that formula? Am I the pig or are you? Oink. Oink.

Until the Muslims look into the mirror darkly in terms of a spiritual sense, their staged pretense at being a religion as a key into a spiritual realm is quite iffy if you ask me. Well you did ask me. You are reading this.

Stay in the forest, desert, jungle – eat your own shit and leave my precious western civilization alone. We have been building this civilization for at least ten thousand years.

We have enough problems trying to cope with the good and bad of modern day life without having to look over our shoulders for losers from Islam that think suicide is a good thing – FECK OFF!

If you cannot act like human beings, then try to pretend to be part of the brotherhood, sisterhood of mankind. If you do not have love in your heart for your fellow human beings – who needs you? I don’t!

There are enough losers in the west without putting out a welcome mat for the likes of your suicide virgin humpers.

We have to live on the same planet. We have to share many of the same resources on this planet. It is simply bad manners to keep acting like the worst thing around and still think your religion is the end all in belief systems. Well it ain’t!

Your shit stinks just like mine. Get a life. Get a belief system that is not a fantasy and an excuse to hate, maim or kill!

Have a nice and not a bloody day you ugly fanatic so-called Islamists.

Fort Hood - Tragedy - More Sacrifice Needed

From someone who was on the front lines of America on September 11, 2001, the tragic shooting and killing of Army Personnel at Fort Hood Texas about to deploy is beyond words. If you are not safe in the middle of a military base – well you know what I mean.

It is also sad to say – this particular incident is at a safe distance from many of us.

The personal toll and burden of our land war in Asia is not shared equally by all Americans, and falls unfairly on the military and their families.

This generation at the helm is perhaps trying archaic and obsolete methodology in the craft of war. Technology makes war much more abstract these days. No more Battles of the Bulge - more like mopping up at an unpaved street intersection in the middle of adobe town, anywhere, Asia. More times than not, casualties in our current land war in Asia are the result of digitally timed anti-personnel devices or crude old fashioned land mines and not from direct combat.

So too, many of those in charge in Washington paying, borrowing heavily overseas for these wars, have never served in the military. Deferments in Vietnam went to those who could afford college and not the working class who got drafted to fight that stupid useless vain enterterprise.

It was the draft that brought that war more keenly into focus to the American people. The politicians demand for sacrifice went beyond sacrifice and into the realm of insanity in Vietnam.

I am not surprised that an incident like this massacre in Fort Hood Texas had not happened before. But it has. Columbine and Virginia Tech, to name a few, are signs of the weakness of our society where guns and violence become the final answer to many stress filled situations.

Outsiders, even if native born, take the casual bullying and disrespect from day to day society. In the end we are only as strong as our weakest link. The sensitive, the unloved, the misunderstood set apart from the so-called main stream norm sheds light on our alphabet soup culture. On some days, these marginalzied people snap and sad to say innocent people die.

This Major at Fort Hood who snapped was a shrink. I heard an online cable commentator refer to any army shrink as a secular father confessor. The things said or heard and not resolved go on and on in the minds of military personnel stretched beyond their capacity. This psychological burden also carries over onto people treating them. It is indecent what we are doing to our sons and daughters in our military. Asking them to go an extra mile for all of us not serving – not making the equivalent of their sacrifice.

Major Hasan is in Intensive Care. His name has not been added yet to the 75 or more recorded suicides of soldiers at Fort Hood since 2003. There are no stats available for attempted suicides. That is a sad statistic aside from those dead at Fort Hood from the other day and along with the deaths of our military and civilian casualties since 2003 in this new artificial cold war of a wobbling, wobbling a lot of late in its artificial orbit, empire.

Putting aside all the many individual factors of this current tragedy, we need to reexamine this multitasking, recycling of humanity on tour after tour after tour to the breaking point on the front lines of combat.

Wars will never go way. We need everyone in society to bear a greater burden of the process of war if war is in fact necessary.

We need to bring back the draft to support our global empire.