Teaching in 2015 - Worm Grunting Until Convicted

“The government I live under has been my enemy all my active life. When it has not been engaged in silencing me it has been engaged in robbing me. So far as I can recall I have never had any contact with it that was not an outrage on my dignity and an attack on my security.” HL Mencken

"That ability to impart knowledge . . . consists, first, of a natural talent for dealing with children, for getting into their minds, for putting things in a way that they can comprehend. And it consists, secondly, of a deep belief in the interest and importance of the thing taught, a concern about it amounting to a sort of passion. A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it—this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy. That is because there is enthusiasm in him, and because enthusiasm is almost as contagious as fear or the barber's itch." Henry Louis Mencken from  Prejudices: third series (publ. A. A. Knopf, 1922)

Henry Louis Mencken knew how to identify cant, insincerity, humbug, bigotry and sanctimony at the horizon.  He did not need to have it legislated before he could snap his galluses, gnaw on his stogy and shout to the helots, " Hey!  Rube! You're about to step in it for fair, Son!"

Being a fundamentally flawed human being, prone to vice but gifted with talents far above those of most mortals must have made the proud German American beer swilling genius feel like Casandra most days.

He could predict cultural disasters from any bar stool and, while amusing all and sundry, go unheeded.

Mencken stood at the dawn of American Progressive thought and shuddered. Research! Inquiry! Settled Science!  Foregone Conclusions and willful assumptions destroyed shared truth.

Americans ignored shared truth and swallowed data tossed by Academics whole and heartily.

From that magic  moment in 1876, Johns Hopkins University preened its purple feathers and waved proudly for inquiry over pedagogy America tumbled. The German architect of infant fascism, Alexander Humbolt, so impressed the Quaker bachelor

The University of Chicago, packed with Rockefeller spondulix, followed suit and the Academic Jackass eclipsed the pioneer, the innovator, the leader, the priest, the warrior, the athlete and genuine scholar in the America pulpit, bank line, battalion, playing field and imagination.

This past week, the United States Supreme Court wholly justified the very Germanic nonsense HL Mencken fought against his whole life.  Johns Hopskins is the core of this evil apple swallowed whole from the late 18th Century to this silly season.  Marriage ain't no more and ObamaCare is going to be as easy to avoid as taxes.

Mencken understood exactly where America was heading. As a very flawed man with some level of wit, I see the very same nightmare.

We are here, Henry!

A male and a female are matter for a court and future litigation.

A family is a group of people.

States rights are what have been agreed upon.

So teaching, especially in a Catholic school is now a dirtier job than Worm Grunting.

Two self-proclaimed American Catholics on the U.S. Supreme Court, Kennedy and Roberts, have effectively made teaching in a Catholic high school ( Catholic Universities long ago struck the flag) is about to become a very dangerous game; unless, of course,  the teacher  is cowed by the threatening realities of pitting shared truth against conveniently manufactured and very pliable doctrines.

I'll continue to grunt and sweat and dig up a few wormy triumphs in the classroom when students pick up on my enthusiasm for millennia of shared truths ( abortion is always murder, a bolt only goes into a nut, water boils at 212 and freezes at 32 degrees, Shakespeare is a genius and Toni Morrison writes stuff) - until the bracelets get slapped on.

Elwood P. Dowd Stops at the "Quiet Man Pub" for a Quick One

EPD - Evening.                  

One of the Lads- Pleasant night.
                 

EPD- I´ll try one of those black beers.

Bartender- Oh, the porter. Yes, sir.                  

EPD- Sir, will you join me? Matter of fact,

I´d like to buy everybody a drink.

                 
Old Fella -I do not believe I heard your name, tall man.
                 

EDP- Elwood . .Elood P. Dowd and this ( gesturing) this is my good friend . . .Harvey                  

Old Fella- And your father´s name?                  

EPD - Pete.  Pete Dowd.

He used to live here, by the Mornin´.            

I just bought the place back.

That´s why I´m here.                  

Old Fella - Then your grandfather

would be Ol´ Proisnas Dowd.
               

EPD - Right. and This (gesturing to right ) and this is my good friend Harvery . . .he's a Pookah

Old Fella- Bless his memory.  (Sotto Voce) The Yanks daft . . .a Pookah indeed.  Well drink up, Lads Waste not Want Not.



 

                 

Berkeley Balcony Tragedy Will Show Political Dry-Rot At Its Core

Many things, for aught I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever. Bishop George Berkely


Six Irish students on summer Visas died when a balcony collapsed and the New York Times saw fit to make a mockery of their deaths. The kids were accused of rowdy behavior and drunkenness and program for which they had applied was called into question.  The New York Times was worried about Berkeley - the college named for the 18th Century Irish Bishop and empiricist philosopher, but George Berkeley has not yet been accused of being 'loaded.'

The New York Times went far beyond the report of the deaths and Ireland demanded an apology and got one from Grey Lady that is similar to Rachel Dolezal's non-apology.

I think the New York Times took a very agitated and worrisome phone call from a political wheel just before print time.

You see political grifters, lawyers, activists and bundlers are deep in real estate.

Chicago readers might remember the death of a little black boy when a rusted gate of slum property fell on him. That property was managed by Cullen Davis, son of Allison Davis - the man who gave Barack Obama his shove into the White House.  Valerie Jarrett controls slum properties.

A tall, rusted steel gate that fell and crushed a 3-year-old boy to death at the Cabrini-Green public housing complex failed a building code inspection Monday, said Bill McCaffrey, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Buildings.
The gate at the Cabrini-Green rowhouses in the 900 block of North Cambridge Avenue fell on Curtis Cooper at about 5:30 p.m. Friday; he was pronounced dead less than an hour later in Children's Memorial Hospital. . . .

The CHA property has been managed for about two years by Urban Property Advisors. The firm is run by Cullen Davis, who is the son of influential city developer Allison Davis.

"If Chicago Housing Authority had been monitoring their properties, public housing wouldn't be in the shape it is in now," Steele said. "If they had been monitoring UPA, that gate wouldn't have fell."

UPA manages properties all over Chicago. The Davis family stands to make millions as part of CHA's Plan for Transformation, the city's ambitious effort to demolish high-rise public housing and replace it with mixed-income communities.

UPA Property Manager Ronald O'Neal and CHA spokesman Derek Hill declined to comment on Monday's failed building inspection.

Property is political capital and slum property is pure gold.  Note the rotted wooden support beams on the Berkley Building

I hope that Irish journalists crawl into the facts behind the rotten owners of the apartments and the amounts of cash they paid out to politicians -City, State and Federal -and bring the truth to light.

The wood rot begins on the pages of the newspapers providing cover for politicians.

At the end of day, I believe that a politician, political bundlers and the New York Times will have much to explain.

Blackhawks ( Management and Team) Prove that Good Guys Can Be Champions . . .Often

I have no Blackhawks jersey, but I really like Chicago's Champions.  From Rock Wirtz to the hoary old man Brad Richards ( a year younger than Marion Hossa) the Blackhawks Tribe is comprised of nice people. Like Duncan Keith and his pal Cammy.




John McDonough, the architect of this sports dynasty and General Manager, visited Leo High School earlier in the school year.  Leo High School students tend to be Arfican American young gents and not given to wearing Hawks Jerseys.  It seems that African Americans are not huge hockey fans, but the do seem to like basketball, or so really smart people like Spike Lee and Rachel Maddow would lead us to believe.

I am a bit of cynic.

John McDonough was impressed by the insightful and sharp questions the Leo student body posed to him at the assembly more than few months back.  In fact two Leo juniors pressed, Mr. McDonough after the students were dismissed.

Mr. McDonough invited both young men and their families to join him in his Blackhawks Skybox for one of the games in the early part of the season.

He did not need to do that.

That is what constitutes a good guy.  Doing something thoughtful and nice for people who do make any impact on one's life, whatsoever, just because one can do that.  It did not cost John McDonough anything.  Not nickle one.

Now two Leo seniors are loud and proud Blackhawks fans, who closely follow the Hawks and the game of hockey.

That is how Championships are made;not by loud, obnoxious, in-your-your-face mega-millionaire mesomorphs, but by good guys who never forget that they share the same oxygen as everyone else.

White Socialists Founded NAACP, So Why Beef That White Girl is Running the Spokane Branch?

A white muck-racking journalist was the founder and leader of the National Association of Colored People and he was a dyed-in-the-whool Socialist.  He was Charles Russell and he detested Booker T. Washington. So did the Niagra Movement, a group of fifty northern born well-eduacted African Americans who believed that Booker T. Washington's demand blacks in south and  the north learn skilled trades, as well as get an education was too slow and demeaning and Booker T. Washington, a man who endured a life-time slavery. unlike WEB Dubois, was an Uncle Tom.

A white law by tyhe name of Moorfield Storey ran NAACP for twenty years from 1909-1929.

In 1909 Russell was among 60 inspirational men and women such as Oswald Villard, William Walling, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jane Addams, and Lillian Wald who worked together to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), formed in the aftermath of a race riot at Springfield, Illinois in August of the previous year.[5] Russell's participation in the founding of the NAACP stemmed from his experiences with violence and racism as a child. One of the most memorable experiences included his father nearly being hanged for simply opposing slavery.[4] Russell served and participated on the board of directors for the NAACP for the remainder of his life. 

Of the sixty founders, only seven were black.

White Socialists detested the greatest African American hero - Booker T. Washington. Therefore, they setabout the task of erasing Booker T. Washington from history.  WEB DUBOIS , a pampered Harvard educated gent born to privilege, like most Progressives, was added to the original pantheon of NAACP.

Today, we learned that a white girl, who could have been a model for St. Pauli Girl beer brands, is running the Spokane, WA branch of the NAACP. What's the beef?

John Kass on Denny Hastert's Day in Court - Pulitzer Worthy Prose That Rises to Poetry

John Kass can work a pen.  He is a masterful penman and never better than when he covers a story so coiled in hypocrisy that keeps lesser artists slack jawed.  This is one of those Gordian Knots -the powerful politico bighted around a predatory pedophile.

John Kass's account of Denny Hastert's day in court rises to poetic heights -

For at least 15 excruciating minutes, the courtroom was silent, Hastert waiting. He'd pull at his lips and he'd cover his face again. Not all of his face, just the half where his mouth was.
He looked all hollowed out, chewed up, like paper. 

It reminded me of when my brothers and I were children on the South Side. We'd run to Leo's corner store to buy penny candy, like those colored dots, hard sugar lumps on paper rolls. Sometimes we'd take a bite of paper with the candy and later spit it out as we talked of the White Sox or what happens to souls in limbo.

That bit of chewed-up paper would dry in the sun, a lump on the sidewalk that had been paper but was now in altered form.

And so it was with Hastert, irreconcilable with the original, an altered man most likely changed by having to tell his family about why the feds had come after him.

Masterful.  The story of the criminal charges is merely crust covering the saga of man who may have used teaching and coaching to prey upon vulenerable kids.  Kass is the man to uncoil this yarn.

Maybe A Few Generations of 'Survivors' of Roe v. Wade Will Put an End to Abortion in America

 

In a sense, every American born since 1973 is a survivor of Roe. Perhaps that explains why, however young people might label themselves, abortion is a choice so few of them are prepared to take. Boston Globe

Abortion is the premeditated murder of a human being.  In 1973, a well-orchestrated campaign, not unlike the very successful one that will very shortly terminate the all sense of what marriage means, changed that fact.

Abortion is now known as women's health care, which is nonsense.

America's slide from the moral high ground to its current place in the moral mud pits can be traced from Roe v. Wade.

However, young people are doubting the narrative about abortion

Young Americans — voters under 30 — were once the most gung-ho in support of unfettered legal abortion. In 1991, fully 36 percent believed abortion should be legal under any circumstances. But by 2010, 18-to-29-year-olds had become more pro-life than their parents — only 24 percent still wanted to keep abortion legal in all cases. More than any other age cohort, in fact, young adults are now the most likely to think abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.

My long-in-the-tooth Baby Boom contemporaries largely bought-in to the willful murder of unwanted children, I am ashamed to say.  We are the Disposable Generation, that created landfills for the Huggies we put on the babies who survived Planned Parenthood and now the Depends we need and added those convenient products to the piles of Schick disposable razors, plastic bottles, cutlery and batteries that powered our music devices that played Jerry Garcia and Carly Simon into the 21st Century.  We were OK with that because we were otherwise thoughtful and sensitive about our fellow man.

We elected Barack Obama, people and Obama is America's abortion President.

Young people have good hearts.


I am confident that the generations to come will end the American Holocaust.

Only then will America climb up out of the mud and crawl its way back up to the peak of the moral high ground.

Good on you, kids!

Chuck Goudie Smears Leo High School

Chuck Goudie makes a very good living off of smearing people.  He works for ABC, the network that will feature a sit com developed by Dan Savage, (a violently hateful Anti-Catholic bigot who parlayed sexual preference into a sitcom) and operates what he calls the ABC 7 I-Team.

I began work at Leo High School in 1995, four years after the Irish Christian Brothers refused to send teachers to this school in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood.  The Irish Christan Brothers taught and operated Leo High School from 1926, until 1991.

In the late 1990's, the priest-pedophile scandal knocked the Catholic Church to its knees, where it remains trying to undo the damage of homosexual and some heterosexual child stalkers who used the Church to prey on children.  This scandal swelled to epic proportons because bishops listened to lawyers.

They still do.  Problems do not go away, but the Irish Christian Brothers did - at least here at Leo.  In the wake of the abuse scandals, Leo High School was asked to provide any and all information it might possess concerning the abuse of youngsters by members of the Congregation of Christian Brothers. I joined the President of Leo High School on two depositions concerning the class action lawsuit against the Congregation of Christian Brothers.

From what I gathered, there were more cases in the United States and Canada of physical abuse allegations, than sexual overtures and triumphs by Brothers to students in their keeping.

The Congregation of Christian Brothers is bankrupt.

That does not mean that lawyers can't find some coin. Hence, Chuck Goudie's I-Team smear.  Chuck, who violated crime scenes in the past ( Miglin Murder), decided to smear Leo High School, even though Leo has no affiliation with the Congregation of Christian Brothers other than history and has helped lawyers bring claims against pedophile hiding behind hard collars.

CHICAGO (WLS) -- The ABC7 I-Team looked into claims by nearly 100 alleged victims of sexual abuse in metro Chicago that the archdiocese and some of its schools are keeping dangerous secrets.

Leo High School is keeping dangerous secrets?  Here they are Chuck !

• Educational experiences for Leo students include speakers of note and field trips.
• One-half of the individuals that work at Leo are Leo graduates.
• No student who wants a good education is turned away. Leo expects its students to succeed and to be the best they can be, as do parents who have a financial obligation.
• Leo’s tuition is $7,000 a year, but no one pays this amount. 50 hours of volunteer work by parents over the course of the school years will lower tuition down to $5,000.  Alumni are also very generous, bringing the average tuition cost down to $4,000 per year. This is in contrast to $15,000 actual cost at Leo High School to educate one student.  Based on 2014-15 published tuition rates, the average tuition of South Side Catholic Schools is $10,000.
• Leo does face competition from other charter schools.  There are five in the 17th ward.
• Leo provides a rigorous college prep program.  Although no direct subsidies are received from a religious institution (Leo does have a chapel), Leo benefit from the Big Shoulders Fund that supplies support to Catholic schools in the neediest areas of inner-city Chicago.  Big Shoulders performs prep work free for Leo students.
• There is a very supportive and interested alumni, loyal and dedicated, who often show up at Leo unannounced. This year’s alumni banquet attracted 700 Leo grads and guests.
• Although the Leo high school building is structurally old and lacks the frills and attractiveness of school buildings located in more affluent areas, the structure is solid and was built to last.  Upkeep and maintenance costs are therefore kept at a minimum.

Chuck Goudie is very well paid and he is not very truthful.

He says this to close Investigations, " The I-Team left numerous messages at , Leo and . . . Schools, but never heard back."

Not true, Chuck.  One lovely young African American single mother of two answers, or takes down every phone message, every e-mail and every carrier pigeon missiive that come to Leo High School, where it has been since 1926 at 7901 S. Sangamon Street 60620, ph.(773) 224-9600 ex. 208 (for me) and fax at (773) 224-3856. E-mail come to admin@leohighschool.org. Also, every commnication with regard to Leo High School goes through a genuine journalist and newsman, Leo President Dan McGrath.  This inquiry, Chuck, would not be Dan McGrath's first rodeo.  We got nothing from ABC, Channel 7, or the I-Team.

Nothing from I-Team and nothing from Chuck. So, that is a smear - saying we do not return phone calls, much less keep "dangerous secrets."

Unless Chuck Goudie is prepared to call a lovely young African American single mother of two a liar, I'd say Chuck should crawfish on his report in a very public manner.

In a really nice world, a Leo Alumnus who has a very public record of going to court and righting public wrongs should give Chuck Goudie an old school legal ass-kicking.

A Savage Murdered Brian O'Malley's Son

Savage Mr. Pitts - Savage :Middle English: from Old French sauvage 'wild', from Latin silvaticus 'of the woods', from silva 'a wood'. - and the boy he slaughtered Kevin O'Malley

Kevin O'Malley was murdered by a savage in Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago, this past weekend.  Kevin is the son of Brian O'Malley, Leo Class of 1972.

Leo High School has had more than its share of blood spilled by the hands of savages - shot, stabbed, or  bludgeoned.

This is not a delicate subject whatsoever. Savages murdered Leo freshman Antonio Davis and put Leo Man Miles Turner in Illinois Rehab for the better part of a year and a wheelchair.  Savages murdered Officers Eric Lee and William Fahey.  Savages murdered Leo Valedictorian and Golden Gloves Champion Jason Riley.  Savages murdered a Leo student from Canaryville's brother in a gangway at 45th & Wallace.  Savages come in every race, creed and of course color.

To say, this is not the case is unjust.

Kevin O'Malley's mother and father, like the thousands of anguished parents and relatives who cry out over the loss of victims of savagery on the evening news, are going to bury their child.  Kevin O'Malley is the same age as my son.

The savage who shot Kevin O'Malley will be considered for  comfort by the people who do not want us to use the noun that describes base, animal humans who only understand impulses.

Our culture makes victims of savagery privileged characters, or, at best, people to be forgotten and turns savages into cult heroes - give the media forty-eight hours and Mr. Pitts will become Mr. Chips, without an opportunity.

That is wrong in every color of the rainbow.

May Christ comfort the O'Malley family and welcome home Kevin OMalley.