07:52 – It wasn’t as minor as we’d hoped. Barbara’s dad had a bad fall yesterday afternoon about 1400. No one notified Barbara for almost an hour. She and her mom and sister spent the next eight hours or so at the emergency room, before they finally admitted her dad at least for overnight. Barbara finally got home at midnight. Her dad is okay for now. They ruled out a stroke or TIA. At this point, they think a cardiac arrhythmia caused her dad to lose consciousness momentarily and fall. The hospital was actually ready to release her dad last night, but Barbara told them she wasn’t comfortable taking him home in his current state. He was still having trouble breathing and showing signs of CHF. So they’re keeping an eye on him for a while until they’re sure it’s safe for him to go home.
10:38 – I no longer have a cell phone. When I called Barbara on her cell phone yesterday, I thought I’d better check the balance on her Boost Mobile prepaid cell phone. So I went over to the Boost Mobile web site and logged in. Sure enough, she was down to something like $8. Then I noticed something strange on her account page. The call I’d just made to her had been charged at $0.75. That was really strange, considering that Boost Mobile bills in one-minute increments and Barbara has a flat $0.10/minute rate. So how could a call cost $0.75? As it turns out, it was a three-minute call, but Boost Mobile increased their prices as of yesterday from $0.10/minute to $0.25/minute. Geez.
So I decided just to give Barbara my PlatinumTel prepaid phone, which costs only $0.05/minute and just order another one for myself. The trouble was, they had only four phone models on offer, and none of them were clamshells. I carry a cell phone in my pants pocket, which means I really need a clamshell model. Oh, well. I’ll just wait until they have more models in stock. For now, I’ll do without.
As it turns out, BoostMobile is “encouraging” people with iDEN phones to buy new phones. BM still has something like a million iDEN users, and Sprint is in the process of shutting down their iDEN network. Apparently, they’ve already shut down thousands of iDEN towers nationwide (which explains why Barbara has had problems with spotty service availability for the last few months) and they plan to shut down the network completely as of next June. It was time for Barbara to get a different phone anyway. She wanted a clamshell model too, so I just gave her mine. So today she’s giving her new cell phone number to her sister and parents, who were the only ones who had the old one. Once she does that and clears any current voicemail, she’ll just shut down her old phone and let it die when the time expires.
I’m sorry to hear Barbara’s dad is in the hospital again, but I’m glad to hear Barbara spoke up about it being too soon for him to go home.
The good news is that all this stuff is scaring him. He’s finally agreed to give up his car. Last night, Barbara asked him what would have happened if his LOC had occurred while he was driving. He said he’d probably have killed himself and maybe other people.
I mentioned the walker to Barbara last night. She’s going to talk to the physical therapist about it, but to my way of thinking it’s a no-brainer. Her dad currently has an ordinary cane. She couldn’t even talk him into using a four-foot cane like I use. That one-foot cane is of minimal help if Dutch starts to fall. I told Barbara that one of the main purposes of a walker is to turn an uncontrolled fall into a controlled fall.
Oh-oh, I got a Boost Mobile for my wife last summer, not for yap-yap but emergency only. I selected them as the minimum was the lowest of all and the confiscation period was the longest. So when she didn’t use any of her $10 in 90 days, I bought another $10 for the next 3 months. Well, so much for that…..
It’s only the iDEN models that are affected.
Gee, some new talent down in Oz; has Greg been notified?
http://order-order.com/2012/11/07/nadine-dorries-i-presume/
Here’s a senior NSW cop saying what our host has being saying for a long time:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-09/officer-peter-fox-claims-catholic-church-covering-up-abuse/4362000
It’s not just that the RCC covers up child rape and moves rapist priests around to allow them to keep raping. It’s that this has been the official policy of the RCC, which is why I have called it a criminal organization. Worse than the Mafia, in fact. If the Mafia found out that some of their made men were raping children, they wouldn’t admit to it publicly. What they would do is kill the offenders and dispose of the bodies. If the RCC had done the same, they’d at least be able to claim that they’re no worse than the Mafia. They haven’t. Of course, the Mafia guys have wives and children. Priests don’t, or at least not that they’ll admit to.
Again with the comparisons to the Mafia? It’s not like the RCC is running a protection racket offering everlasting peace for a portion of your weekly take… Oh, wait, nevermind!
I’d hang the culprits and enablers myself, personally, kick the stool right out from under them. And then move on to the other denominations, publik skools, colleges and universities, etc.
While continuing to note the tiny numbers involved, either as victims or perps, compared to an organization of over a billion people and hundreds of thousands of clergy, over decades, with dates of some of these incidents going back to the 1940s and 1950s, long after most parties are dead and buried. And besides continually having our noses rubbed in it by the hateful and bigoted MSM, the only people being punished and suffering for this are today’s long-suffering ordinary parishioners.
Well, I will point out that you have no evidence that every priest who ever lived was not a child rapist. On what basis do you claim “tiny numbers”?
But again, the point is not how many or what percentage of priests rape children. The point is how many or what percentage of priests knew what was going on and either did nothing to stop it or in fact actively colluded in covering it up. At this point, it seems to me that the answer to that question is 100% to a close approximation, all the way up to and including Mr. Pope.
Gee, I guess you got me there; I have, indeed, no evidence for all those priests. All we have is a tiny number accusations, compared to even the clergy still living, and an even tinier number of convictions. And it seems to me, at this point, that when we know even within families abuse can go on for decades undetected by anyone, it is no surprise that most clergy hadn’t a damn clue what was going on. If it can be proven that some did, especially people in leadership and supervisory positions, then let’s string them up forthwith. I bet it wouldn’t take us an afternoon.
As for the current Holy Father, my understanding is that when he became aware of these incidents he was the guy who got things rolling to stamp it out and bring people to account, bearing in mind that his main gig most of the time was as an official theologian squirreled away in the Vatican library stacks, not a run-of-the-mill parish priest like his brother George in Germany.
Hey, I’m just as pissed off as anybody here, as are most of my fellow parishioners; we’re seeing long-time historical parish churches and schools being closed, church properties being sold off, and under constant pressure and bad tidings, watching millions being scarfed up by battalions of lawyers and their media stooges, worse than sharks and vultures. We’d happily line up a row of bishops and archbishops and cardinals against a wall and blow their asses away if we could fix all this so easily. And I won’t say here what I would have done if it was my kid.
What we do know is that Cardinal Mahoney, LA boss of bosses, refused all supoenas for records by the states attorney using every slimey lawyer trick until the statue of limitations saved the perverted pedophile pedarest priests. What was not sucessful was the cure for which he sent them away and after which non-cure he reassigned them to other facilities also attended by juvenile boys.
FYI…
I think I have seen you mention at least one in the CK-12 series of high school text books. I found today that all of them appear to be free at the moment, and there are many more than the last time I checked. That includes a few second editions, some of which I have the originals for. They seem to have started splitting some of the math books into two parts.
I think the more serious paedos and their accomplices, like the Capo di tutti capi of LA should get to meet their maker ahead of schedule. I mean, do we need these people?
Some of the lesser offenders should get a free appointment with a surgeon, to make their offending a bit more difficult.
I understand the way the Mafia protects its own, but if I was high up in the RC church I’d want the paedos out quick, so as not to scare away the paying customers.
Dave, it’s not that there are many or few paedos in the RC church (and Protestant churches I regret to admit) but that the organisations cover up and protect, bringing the whole institution in to disrepute. There are cases continuing to come to light, and we tend not to have a statute of limitations at all, or not as often as you guys do. I think justice delayed is justice denied, and it’s never too late to try and punish these guys, whether they were paedos in the 1960s or SS guards in the 1940s.
I’ve been frustrated on occasions to see cases come up that are 30-40 years old. I mean, those kids were abused in the Sixties but they could have reported the abuse earlier. But better late than never.
“The trouble was, they had only four phone models on offer, and none of them were clamshells. I carry a cell phone in my pants pocket, which means I really need a clamshell model. ”
Why do you need a clamshell? I carry my Nokia X2, a flat 110 mm x 45 mm x 10 mm in my jeans pocket.
Re: the iDEN system. My inside contact says the only reason it has survived as long as it has, is that it is the platform that delivers the paging service between cell phones. They no longer offer that service to new customers, but apparently there are still lots of businesses who continue using it. Nevertheless they are cutting the number of towers, and that includes antennae on the tower of the radio project. There are 2 other people on that tower besides us: Nextel iDEN and a cement company’s 2-way radio system. The cement company just put in a new transmitter and antenna, so they are not going anywhere. But my contact says the Nextel equipment and antennae will be gone by the end of the year.
Bill wrote:
“It’s not like the RCC is running a protection racket offering everlasting peace for a portion of your weekly take… Oh, wait, nevermind!”
I’m amazed Bill, you’re starting to sound like a cynic…
I was trying to be a comic!
I just read, and this made me LOL, that Facebook is the second most favorite word that starts with F and ends with K.
Hmm, what’s the first?
Now there having a “special commission of enquiry, rather than a royal comission. Not as good, but better than nothing.
From the article:
“While similar to a royal commission, special commissions of inquiry are restricted to looking into possible offences which may justify prosecution, while royal commissions can have a wider scope.
Special commissions are also required to observe the rules of evidence as applicable in a court of law, while royal commissions have no such restrictions.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-09/nsw-announces-commission-into-police-handling-of-abuse-claims/4363454
“…Cardinal Mahoney, LA boss of bosses…”
Yeah, Mahoney; one of the old crew of librul Catholics who rose to high position and then got even more hardcore librul. A lot of these cases occurred during the watches of the most librul bishops and cardinals over the last fifty years. They’re either gone already or going away soon, and the new regime is not going to tolerate this crap.
Yes, I understand about justice delayed and statutes of limitations and the fact that a lot of the perps are dead or in their dotage and the victims waited decades to announce their victimhood, i.e. once all the shark lawyers got involved and there were bags of money floating in the air to be pulled down. I also understand that the vast majority of cases involved homosexual encounters and relationships between a minority of clergy and either consenting or semi-consenting adolescent males. What riles me and other faithful is that the whole deal is portrayed by the hateful, bigoted librul media as a virtual holocaust of hundreds of thousands of priests molesting small children at will all these decades while the cardinals, bishops and popes looked on benignly.
Nothing is further from the truth and to continually imply and outright state otherwise is a damnable fabrication and lie.
I’ll try it once more: a very small minority of clergy engaged in sexual encounters with adolescent males, often of a consensual nature. An even smaller group cohabited with women as common-law-wives and sometimes children. A much smaller minority than THAT actually abused children. Then…a bunch of Glorious Sixties librul bishops and cardinals, mostly, perverters and betrayers of Vatican II, engaged in coverups and playing musical parish assignments with various of these clergy over the years and stonewalled allegedly unbiased “law enforcement” authorities, egged on by squadrons of lawyers and media snipers. The latter repeated the lies often enough, and continue to do so, and one result is that the lies get repeated everywhere as gospel truth, like global climate warming, for example. Or the benefits of affirmative action, unlimited immigration and gay marriages.
So what we have now is a long-term and concerted attack on the Church (while other organizations skate) and a relentless and continued assault on the pockets of faithful parishioners. And the band played on…
Also, to note: the site has been intermittently wicked slow and just now trying to post or move to another day here drops me to a weird Windows search page; if I run into it again I’ll post the url here accordingly.
Here is an example of how these stories get viciously and with malice aforethought turned around:
http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/1735/sex_lies_and_hbo_documentaries.aspx
I think there’s plenty of blame to be shared around, not just amongst the paedos and their defenders in the RC and other churches; the cops and society in general have to shoulder a lot of the blame for not believing, or at least taking seriously, the accusations kids were making.
There was a lovely chap called Paul Francis Kearney, who ran an orphanage in a town in Western Australia called Bindoon. Most or all of the child labourers here were kids sent out from the UK, often illegitimate. He had an amazing ego, was a sadist and paedo, and even intimidated his fellow “Christian” Brothers.
Details here:
http://www.democrats.org.au/speeches/index.htm?speech_id=1509&display=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Keaney
This chap was well liked in society in general and had a large statue of himself erected, which I think has since been torn down. The kids, now in their seventies and eighties, were completely wrecked by this:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/i-can-still-hear-the-kids-screams-20110611-1fyap.html
Some of the kids reported the abuse to the cops, who rebuked them for telling such lies about such a pillar of the community and returned them for more abuse.
I despise ambulance chasers too, but for at least some of those kids the compensation, inadequate as it is, is well deserved. If it means some Catholic churches have to be sold to charismatics or for a parking lot, that’s too bad.
Yeah, the properties are being sold off; no biggie; the demographics alone argue for that; same deal with the other “mainstream” Christian denominations in this country. There are no more large and lively ethnic communities in the cities to support those parishes that were so strong back in the 50s and 60s and the people scattered to the ‘burbs as soon as they were financially able to do so. The strongest and fastest growth for Anglican and Roman Catholic churches is now in the southern hemisphere, particularly in Africa and south Asia. Also far more conservative, unlike here in the enlightened and progressive West, that has so many successes to its credit since the Glorious Sixties.