Frustrated at being denied a job with the cops, they suddenly started talking about killing cops - Maritimers, doesn’t that sound just like Gabriel Wortman ?

This story, based on thousands of “chatroom” conversations between members of American far right terrorist members, reveals how many were hopeful of advancing fast in various law enforcement agencies and the military.

But when that didn’t work (because basically they were seen by all sensible people as wacko and weird) they began talking up plans to start killing police and soldiers in the hope of starting a revolution in which their Boogalo forces would kill their way into being America’s top dogs.

Like Gabriel Wortman, these males were frustrated losers, feeling powerless in a culture that demanded a minimum of competency.

The one job they all felt they could handle real well was holding a gun and killing people with it. Black people for a start but the list went on and on, given their high interest in the Nazis.

(A group that never seemed to lack groups of human beings it wanted to murder.)

The professionals who study the processes of the human mind for a living can better explain the coping mechanisms that turn frustrated people into hate against the object they most wanted earlier.

Me, I will rely on the thousands of  years of wisdom wrapped in Aesop and his Fables.

The Fox who being unable to get at the tasty bunch of sun-ripened sweet grapes high on the vine, walks away convincing himself they were very bitter anyway...

Gabriel Wortman & Hugh MacKay vs Matt : “Abuse of Process” ????

                                                   (The tall one is NOT  Hugh MacKay...)

Your ‘Day In Court’ can be different - so very different - whether or not you have money and influence, like millionaire Gabriel Wortman or MLA Hugh MacKay - or you have Sweet *uck All - like North End Dartmouth child Matt and his parents back in winter of 2001-2002....

James Vincent Duhig - extraordinary penicillin pioneer ; extraordinary Australian

 Its not as if academic Australia has ignored JV (James Vincent) Duhig : his name has to turn up in any account of Australia’s school of rationalist thought, its tee-tolling irishmen,its painters & dramatists, its founder of famous literary journals & of medical schools, its polio and penicillin brave warriors extraordinaire.

(I might have missed a few.) (His pioneering blood bank work for one.)

But he is not popularly known throughout Australia - not like his famous uncle archbishop Sir James Duhig, who actually managed to outlive his nephew. Bishop Duhig, like his nephew was a builder of institutions (University of Queensland among them) but he was more famous for the sturdy physical institutions he threw up all over Greater Brisbane.

The Irish Catholic for most of Australia’s history were its largest minority by far - a very powerful minority as they tended to remain employees, work the trades and join unions and thence the Labor party.

Queensland was the most Irish Catholic part of the entire country and hence Bishop Duhig’s powers locally were even more significant. It might not be a coincidence than his long reign as Bishop spanned the equally long reign of when the Labor party dominated politics at the federal and State level.

This is all to say that while JV Duhig was a very brave and bold medical pioneer, particularly in such a cautious and conservative little country, his self-confidence might have coming simply from being a ‘Duhig’ in Brisbane-town, even if he was famously a free thinker and his other relatives stalwarts of the church universal !

Here are some photos of the man - until recently I could only find one terrible photo of him, these are much better : the first while a young med student, the next taken in the 1940s while preparing a bust of JV, and then JV as a bust, the next is his famous uncle and last was also taken in the 1940s.

I recently learned that he somehow made the time to help found one of Australia’s best known literary journals in the same year he was busy singlehandedly making penicillin en masse and saving lives.

 (Because while he felt that the wartime federal government was moving forward on the antibiotic with the best speed any government is capable of - which is to say ‘moderately fast’  —- for his dying civilian patients, that was simply not good enough...)

Trump 2020 team tries a bold (or it is foolhardy ?) new experiment in electoral politics

PRESIDENT BLING & the rapper culture are made for each other...

 The Trump Team has spent a small fortune directed at less-educated black and latino males, trying to get them to like Trump for his hyper-male rapper style “grab the Ho by the p*ssy” personality.

It has worked - Trump has gained millions of new supporters in this group away from Biden.

Biden has had to settle for gaining a lot of female supporters away from Trump.

But here’s the catch : forget fretting over last hour’s latest poll : there is a consistent trend going so far back into the mists of time that we don’t know when it started, that will make a big difference on the actual ballots cast, versus a pollsters’ head count of  mere ‘supporters’.

Women have always voted more so than men and the widest gap is between less educated black and latino women (Biden’s biggest fans) and less educated black and latino males (a large number who favour Trump).

Will the small fortune spent by the Trump Team on finding and converting less educated black and latino males (and presumably also driving them to the polls on Election Day)  convert these livelong non-voters into actual voters ?

And will this effort blow past the tens of millions of black and latino women who are eager and willing to find their way to the ballot box under their own steam, without any expenditure from Biden?

We will know in two weeks time...

2020 Ballot Question : “Do you want your kids to grow up in Mr Roger’s Neighbourhood - or live with their crazy uncle all the time ?”

 

If American women are going to decide the 2020 American elections - and I believe they will - then it is fitting that two of those women had the honour of finally settling the all important Ballot Question:

“Moms, do you want your children to grow up in Mr Roger’s Neighbourhood - or do you want them to live with their crazy uncle all the time?”

Thank GOP strategist Mercedes Schlapp, a media messaging expert, I might add , for setting up the first half of the ballot question.

She tweeted to a national audience and tried to ‘diss’ Joe Biden by comparing him to the beloved TV personality and Presbyterian minister Fred Rogers, well known for always promoting kindness and decency. (President Trump is a Presbyterian by the way, Mercedes !)

I think her comments are what we in the trade called ‘earned’ Democratic media worth, what, $300 million ?

The second part of the ballot question came from journalist, lawyer and Democratic voter Savannah Guthrie who pulled most of NBC’s irons out of a very hot fire by grilling President Trump instead - and in a way that had never happened before in his entire life.

As the President once against promoted a QAnon lie that the navy Seals did not really kill bin Laden , the thoroughly exasperated Guthrie said you’re the President , you can’t just walk away from responsibility for promoting this shit like you were just some crazy uncle.

Bullseye !

Because we all - all of us - have a ‘crazy uncle’ somewhere in our extended families : yes, yes it might be a brother in law or a crazy girl cousin, but you know what I mean.

The kind that makes Thanksgiving dinner an embarrassing and tense affair every year.

I’ve been scanning the early media reports and these two gotchas are the big takeaways from the duelling townhalls.

‘Cause I love ya, I’m just putting them both together in one slick smoothie for your breakfast discernment.

No need to thank me...

Keillor, Trump & I agree on one thing : send abortion issue down to the states

Garrison Keillor got sanded-and-blasted yesterday for suggesting it wouldn’t be so bad if a new ever-more-conservative US Supreme Court  decided (aka compromised) on Roe v Wade by sending it back down to the individual States to decide.

Later that same night, President Trump essentially agreed with Keillor at the NBC town hall - reporters thought it was perhaps the ‘deepest’, most thought-out, answer he gave all night.

I had planned earlier yesterday to post my agreement with Keillor but neglected to do so : so let me add my voice now.

The Supreme Court 1973 decision making abortion rights a  black and white constitutional issue, rather than a gray political issue, created a new and dangerous fault line in American national politics fully the equal to that of Slavery in the 19th century.

For in practise, year around, day by day, most Americans deal with abortion decisions on a ‘circumstances alter cases’ basis, being neither absolutely for or against abortion in all circumstances.

But  by making it a national constitutional issue, at election time, our cousins to the south do tend to become overnight fundamentalists : inalterably for or against abortion in the starkest of black and white terms.

It has led conservatives (and now their liberal counterparts) to essentially abandon politics except to the extent that political winners get to pack courts not with neutral judges but rather judges already zealots - for or against - on the issues they are supposed to view dispassionately.

I think we can look to the Canadian model to see how abortion might have played out in the US. 

In practise, regardless of the new federal law, obtaining an abortion in Canada remained dependent on decisions made by individually elected provincial governments and hospital boards.

But unlike an universal and eternal constitutional ruling, it turned out that there was a lot of flexibility in the set-up.

Pro-Choice women (if I can put money aside, which you never really can) were somewhat free, as individuals, to have abortions by going on a visit to another province or another hospital or even by permanently moving to another province.

And as a collectivity, Pro-Choice women could work to elect provincial governments and hospital boards with a different view on abortions. Just as the other side could do likewise.

But the Pro Life side had to face three things that rather took the wind out of their sails.

Unlike a constitutional decision, political decisions can reverse - back and forth - every four years.

It was tiring refighting the same battle over and over - that needn’t happen with a constitutional win.

And political decisions can be nuanced, unlike constitutional ones : instead of simply totally banning or totally freeing abortions, politically crafted abortion policies could capture most voters in the muddled middle -something the inflexible Right to Lifers simply couldn’t bend to.

And most Right to Lifers were fundamentally anti national governments making all the decisions and were very much pro local options.

 Great, except that meant that women were free to evade Right to Life decisions made by one province or one hospital board by simply exercising their constitutional right to mobility.

I suspect the same thing would happen in America over time, once again.

We tens to forget the power of mobility rights : the minute they were free to move, blacks voted with their feet ( since they couldn’t vote with their ballots) and left the very racist South for the less racist North - by the millions.

Ditto gays, minorities and immigrants of all sorts : they fled to cities and states where the governments gave them more of what they wanted.

 The results were bigger than any election : in fact, they decided elections - or rather, would have, if the American electoral system was fully based on one person one vote, which it definitely is not.

California and Montana are about the same size in area but one has 40x the population and 40x the economic,cultural and political clout of the other.

(Oops - except in the Senate, where each is fully equal. Which is why, totally unlike Canada, American “MPs” are powerless and the Senators have all the power. But I digress.)

One state has all the policies conservatives dream of - the other is more liberal. But which state won the ‘mobility’ wars ?

So relax people, let the states decide on abortions - and lets see how it all plays out.

Not the way conservatives will have hoped is my bet...

why university Music Departments are so dreadful : they base their theories on Nature but their scales on Humanity

             True Harmony is NOT to be found in what your music teacher teaches you

Not even Trump defends Modernity as fervently as any liberal arts university’s Music Department does, despite being filled with mostly left-leaning academic musicians.

A Paradox to be sure.

The Western European genre known as “The Common Practise Period”  or “Modernity in Music” lasted only for 150 years.

 It lasted roughly 1750-1900, and even then only in European art music - what the rest of us wrongly call ‘classical’ music. A merely blip in the long history of humanity’s music making around the world.

But, in the minds of the world’s university music departments and their hundreds of millions of living graduates and sycophants, it dominates all of the world’s music, past, present and future : all the world’s music is constantly measures as how well it conforms or deviates to this genre.

For the rest of us, we measure music by how much we like it : the world’s music charts and lists of all-time standards serve us plenty well.

Why should we care that our favourite song failed the CPP exam massively ?

Indeed why should we care that virtually all of the music produced during the CPP would also fail - in some way - the CPP test ?

The problem began with the fact that while the theories of the CPP were based on the harmonic series, a fact of Nature - their scales and hence practises were actually based upon the learned illusions of Humanity.

CPP music is based around the equal temperament system of creating musical scales wherein all the notes are now slightly flatter or sharper than Nature, but overall listenable, particularly when you are fed nothing else.

This allows a simple fretted or keyboarded instrument to move from key to key without re-tuning.

This is good because under CPP and equal tuning, all the various intervals sound boring alike in all the keys, by design. (If not for the new ability to shift keys freely, and hence absolute pitch levels too, we’d all go mad from boredom.)

All the modes and scales of the world - all sounding different and as a result producing wonderfully different melodies - were swept aside by the CPP adopting only one scale/mode, the Ionian, and renaming it the MAJOR scale : in their theory, the only truly scientific scale.

Under Modernity, everything the elites wanted to ram down our throats had to be shown to be based solely on Nature and Science.

The CPP’s Major-only system was said to be scientific because it was based on the small whole number ratios that only the major scale’s third and fifth notes supposedly shared with the scale’s key or tonic note.

Which they do : but only in the old fashioned (and just discarded)  just tuning scales that were actually based on Nature’s harmonic series, not just ‘claimed to be’ !

In the equal tuning set-up of the CPP, the 5th and 3rd had no more a a natural affinity to the tonic note than did any of the other notes : all were dissonant and out of sorts (albeit in a pleasing way I might add).

Only the unison and the octaves are fully consonant with the root tonic, AND in both just and equal tuning systems !

Which is why incidentally, in my music, the main tune and its counter-melody are only ‘doubled’ with these fully consonant intervals : hence being fully 100% harmonic.

Most others would double them with all manner of intervals and it would sound very nice indeed : but nice because they are also ever so slightly dissonant. Nice stuff, but not harmonic : not according to Nature & Science.....

Here is an important statement from the NB RCMP that is NOT about Wortman, bikers, drugs, informants or murder

CBC TV 1984 : “We cant tell you what Mike Marshall has been saying about Minister Regan but it isn’t true”

—verbatim, today, from the desk of the New Brunswick RCMP :

 I wish to address a recently published media story that attempts to make connections between several high-profile investigations involving the RCMP in New Brunswick. This story contains many inaccuracies and misinformation. More disheartening, it is an attempt to sensationalize a tragic event, and to create unnecessary fear for the sake of a "story."

Police investigations can be complex, and can take time. I know people want answers when disturbing and violent acts are committed in their communities, and the RCMP is committed to releasing as much information as we can. At the same time, we must protect ongoing investigations and future court proceedings. We are also subject to legislation such as the Privacy Act, which can restrict what information we can legally release, and when.

Media play an important role in our society. They inform the public, they challenge status quo and traditional narratives, and they ignite and foster dialogue on important subjects. Our relationships with most journalists are based on mutual respect and professionalism. We know they share the same commitment we have to accountability and accuracy to the public. A story such as this undermines that foundation, and breeds misinformation and distrust.

To the members of the public, please carefully consider the stories you read, the accuracy of the information presented, and the source providing it. Most importantly, please consider what you choose to believe.

A/Commr. Larry Tremblay, M.O.M.
New Brunswick RCMP Commanding Officer

Gabriel Wortman used lime & acid to dissolve murdered victims bodies? Yes - and No

John George Haigh dissolved his victims in acid 

It is difficult even for meat-rendering industry to fully dissolve animal bodies - bones & all - even with high pressure -high heat - high tech solutions.

It is much much harder for ordinary individuals to try to do so, though having a large rural property, like Gabriel Wortman, makes it much easier but not fool proof.

Witnesses have told the RCMP and others that Wortman had large quantities of acid and lime on his property to destroy the bodies of people he killed.

(One chemical is much faster at dissolving flesh - the other much better at dissolving bones : hence the need for the two.)

Now these dangerous chemicals are not easily bought in large amounts without leaving a paper trail for police to find and courts to later convict upon.

Nevertheless, this chemist tried to find out how likely were tales of murderers successfully dissolving bodies really were.

He found it very difficult : the process takes a long time at ordinary temperatures & pressures, the acids & bases smell strongly as does the body itself. Spouses, friends, neighbours are likely to smell sometimes not quite right during the long process.

Often murderers who tried this approach were eventually caught and convicted - we obviously can’t estimate the number of those who got away with it.

Only if the victim had no known connection to the murderer would it seem for that to be possible - the paper trail and the physical trail always remains after the deed is done.

Back to Wortman : an isolated building on a large rural property obviously helps.

But even so, something always remains - and again the vast expanses of rural wilderness might help you dispose a bit of remains here and there.

So it remains a possibility that Wortman did murder before April 18th and he did successfully dissolve of their remains.

This is not merely a pointless exercise for some - over the years, people did go missing in the area around Wortman’s Portapique home and their bodies never found.

The most recent one was a man named Walsh, who disappeared mere weeks before the massive region-wide RCMP raid on organized banker gang drug operations.

Until Walsh’s body is found or somebody arrested and convicted in his death, this sort of speculation will continue.

And SHOULD continue - in my opinion...

Did Gabriel Wortman murder BEFORE April 18th - as he claimed ?

 

 

There are two sorts of people who drink too much.

One type we’ll call Types “B” personalities. After one drink, they’re a rocket scientist, after two drinks, a brain surgeon. You know the type.

We don’t pay any attention to what they say after they’d had too much to drink.

Others we will call “Type A” personalities. You never ever know really know what they truly are thinking because they wear such a tight “normal” mask all the time.

But after a few drinks, it all pours out and they really unload about how they feel about their spouse flirting with their best friend. Everyone at the party is floored and more than a little embarrassed : the feelings are just so raw and on the surface.

I never knew Gabriel Wortman, let all be friendly enough with him to get drunk with him when he let down his hair and ‘relaxed’.

But some friends of his have talked about the experience - admittedly after he was dead : but would you actually want to get on this guy’s bad side, by being open and honest about his drinking bouts, while he was still alive ?

They claimed that when drunk Gabe relaxed his normal “I’m just a friendly neighbourhood denturist” act and boasted how he had used his illegal stash of guns to kill people.

Why did he kill them ?

He didn’t say  ——- but it is accepted (even by the sometime fact-resistant RCMP) that he had a 40 year old history of illegally smuggling all sorts of things across the New Brunswick-Maine border and he definitely didn’t like his partners to double cross (or appear to double cross) him.

Eventually we may find the Wortman death toll was higher than 24 dead....

Could Gabriel Wortman have bought his guns LEGALLY in the US ? Under certain circumstances, yes

 Recall the Saudi student who recently killed three people at the US Navy’s Pensacola military base ——with a Gluck he bought LEGALLY in Florida ?

Gun purchases by foreigners is generally limited to hunting weapons bought by foreigners who have obtained a state hunting license. Background checks are made but they are actually not that detailed and probing and there seems no reason why a check with the formal convicted-crime reporting centres in Canada would have raised any alarm bells in the case of Gabriel Wortman.

Criminals merely strongly suspected of a life of crime do not go into these formal - legally restricted - convicted crime databases unfortunately.

So Gabe Wortman might have bought his guns perfectly legally, under Maine law, from that car dealership manager in Houlton that his father Paul alleged was the ‘cut-out’ in a handgun purchase around 2010, a claim he made in a taped conversations with FRANK MAGAZINE back in April 2020....

the BOLSHEVIK & the BILLIONAIRE : who’d have known Putin & Trump would have so much in common ?

Other than Golden Showers I mean.

Both are authoritarian personalities with a strong eagerness to punish anyone they see as political opponents.

But there are still cultural differences.

When Putin, like Stalin, rages about getting rid of political opponents, he does so in private and underlings see to it that someone not closely connected to the boss kills that opponent.

Trump rages publicly - by tweet - and he seeks to have his supine Attorney General jail the boss’s political opponents on trumped-up charges (no pun intended, for once!).

Just like in the case of Nixon, I do not believe that Trump would ever have his opponents killed.

Partly because he believes that to be very wrong and very un-American.

But mostly because both the Department of Justice and many of American judges are increasingly like Stalin’s show trial judges : ready & willing to do whatever the boss wants....

Gabriel Wortman got love of guns from man from Michigan, home of plot to overthrow government, says Pa

 

Full disclosure : my folks come from Windsor Ontario, but its those crazy scary people to the NORTH of them that is on my mind today.

Most of Michigan is to the North of Windsor and even in a gun-crazed America, this state sticks out - it really loves its guns.

You’ve all heard about the Michigan plot to blow up bridges (hopefully not the Ambassador Bridge as that would have crippled our Canadian economy), overthrow governments and kill governors and their kids.

But I bet you might have already forgotten the reaction when photos emerged of armed men terrorizing the Michigan legislature, all because the (female) governor wanted people* to wear masks to prevent Covid at a time when Michigan was a leading death-zone for Covid.

* Opps ! I meant men : all because a woman dared to ask the men in the family to play it safe, for the sake of the kids...

Right - there was no reaction - because the greater American public has come to expect this sort of frontier mentality from Michigan residents to the north and west of Detroit. 

(Not that Detroit itself is the home of Pollyanna and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm either - far from it.)

I bring this all up to set the context for something Paul Wortman said about his son Gabriel’s obsession with owning - and later using - illegal firearms.

Paul claimed Gabriel never got it from either side of his parents but that he believed he acquired this obsession from hanging around the second husband of Paul’s mom, Doris.

A man from Michigan. (Doris’s family was from a part of Ontario where the local American media in the gun-crazed part of Michigan had a clear signal into Canada across the water.)

Luckily no dead as the result of this latest expression of Michigan gun culture. But in Nova Scotia ? Twenty four dead.....

PS : Michigan’s governor pluckily stuck to her covid rules - till a  bent judge just threw them out - and the state now has one of the lowest Covid rates in America....

“Daisy Ad 2020” : ‘Trump loves us he’ll send us a stimulus cheque’, ‘Trump loves us not, no check’

A faithful reader of Time Magazine & Macleans since I was nine, I certainly remember the impact of the infamous “Daisy Ad” of the 1964 presidential election campaign.

I didn’t see it of course -  basically nobody did, at the time - but we all read about it and saw the stills and our mind’s eye filled in the chilling details.

The American adults among us then rushed out and kicked the Republicans to the curb in a way rarely seen before or since.

So deja vu time : Sunday night Trump was all in for financial stimulus to save the cratering US (& global) economy from Covid.

Tuesday, after the Federal chair got a lot of airtime AGREEING with Trump, Trump said no way - no stimulus.

Late that night, after his meds were adjusted, he was back pulling petals off the daisy, this time deciding,’ yes we do need a stimulus check, like, yesterday !!!’

Now I realize all this to and thro back and forth is only the Dexamethasone talking but frankly it scares me.

I don’t like Mike Pence’s politics but I’d rather he was back in Washington, in isolation, but with the military aide carrying the nuclear football, safely beside him —— and not Trump...

America’s next invasion will be into Canada, seeking water not oil this time

Iraq style invasions are, like, so over man !

America will no longer invade others’ lands, pretending to be bringing US style democracy - complete with high tech vote suppression - while actually there to steal their oil.

Because America is finally going renewable as it decides to turn the bloody steadily baking sun into a steady cash crop instead.

But that same baking sun is making the High Plains & South West a lot more dry.

More dry - they’ve always been dry.

That’s why the citizens there been gulping steadily from one-time only giant aquifers to sustain their mass grain crops, that for the manufacturing-depleted American economy, is now their biggest single export.

But a new study out says that both Kansas and Texas are already permanently past their Peak Wheat peak,  as there is less and less in the aquifer beneath their states to sustain the high water-wasting wheat species we all like to grow.

I think Trump & Putin have already cooked up a deal to fix this problem. 

Putin pretends to make a grab for Canada’s northernmost islands looking for gas and oil, so that America can pretend to protect us from the Red State to our north ——- in return for Canadian water concessions for Trump’s Red States to the south.

And if Canada doesn’t give the water concessions - then a steady drumbeat of news stories about the horrors of Canadian socialism (like Medicare covering Covid hospital costs) and an invasion to save Canada from Canadian voters.

Ironically, the provinces Trump’s stormtroopers will invade are Canada’s own Red States : Interior BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba... but hey, no omelettes without breaking eggs, eh ?

Do I sound needlessly paranoid ? I sure hope so...

Jews who voted for & financed Trump now stunned by rise in anti-semitism from his supporters

Forty percent of America’s Orthodox Jews voted for Trump in 2016 - a helpful but hardly decisive nudge towards his surprise victory. 

Far more important was the hundreds and hundreds of millions of money that some of the richest Jews in the world funnelled his way : decisive in paying for all those quiet Facebook ads that encouraged this group of voters to support him and this group of voters to abandon Clinton.

Without this money from these Jews he would not have got elected.

They fully knew what Trump was like of course, but made a pact with the Devil to get what they really wanted - like support for Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. 

They figured they could control and tame Trump.

Too clever by half - like the hundreds of thousands of German Jews who did not flee Hitler’s Germany, figuring they could rinse him away like dirt after a shower.

Some dirt : some shower !

I dont expect all Jews any where any time to think alike or act alike and I do recognize that 70% of all American Jews did in the end vote for Clinton and support her with hundreds of millions as well in donations.

But Jews, like all small insecure groups (and as opposed to larger more secure groups) do show a marked reluctance to attack other Jews publicly on their stances that are harmful to all Jews.

I understand why : but I will argue that in 2016, the best and most moral decision was to in fact attack other Jews on their support for Trump : head on and full force.

Yes it takes great courage  to openly attack one’s own kith and kin but at times, the Talmud suggests, it is morally necessary....

Catholic spiritual leader Rev John Jenkins “Super-Spreader” at White House SCOTUS event ?

 

Given how often the White House inner circle is tested for Covid to keep their germaphobic leader safe from ever having to wash his own hands, wear his own mask or keep his own distance, suspicion has to fall on the one outsider at Sunday’s SCOTUS super-spreader event with a confirmed case of Covid .

That is the defiantly maskless president of famed (till now !) Catholic Notre Dame University, father John Jenkins.

What sort of a message does the behaviour of this university president send to college students across the world about obeying the rules to stay safe from Covid ?

As a Catholic myself, I wish to apologize to all my readers who are not Catholic for this priest’s boorish behaviour.

Not all Catholic leaders display such blatant disdain for the law, public health advice and general moral behaviour.

But many - too many - do. They have put their political feelings above their duty to their flock, the the rest of humanity, and to God.

God - it seems - is this particular case was not pleased....

24 dead payback for failing to get in the Mounties for Gabriel Wortman ?

My high school yearbook said that I aspired to become the Prime Minister of Great Britain which is untrue, sort of.

I HAD however had said I wanted to be a cabinet minister in Britain —- it was the yearbook editors who upped it to Prime Minister.

I doubted they would have done so if I was in fact quiet as a mouse and totally unpolitical : ie there was a very large grain of truth in what the yearbook editors wrote.

Similarly, I will argue - I am arguing, in fact, there was a grain of truth in what the yearbook editors wrote about Gabriel Wortman’s high school ambitions to join the RCMP upon graduation.

He might never had said that - or even thought that - but it was clear to many, even back then, that he was totally obsessed with the RCMP that his two uncles and one cousin ( so far) did in fact join.

I personally think that Gabriel did try to join the RCMP but failed to be accepted. Perhaps because he was already ‘known to Riverview RCMP‘ even back then - or because he failed the psych evaluation primitive as it likely was.

I think this reject by a group he admired so much warped Gabriel - as did some later rejections in other career paths - and helped lead up to his decision to kill, blast and burn his way into an early grave.

I know, I know many people have said he - in later life - mocked and disdained the mounties —-but I also know a fox who did much the same about a stack of grapes too high to eat...