BITCH SESSION

Once again a mishmash of subjects.

A WARNING FROM ADA Stop Using GenStrip Blood Glucose Test Strips, The strips may give erroneous results. The third party manufacture of strips for the Roche tester has refused to recall their product so the Feds recommend the use of “One Touch” strips. See your druggist.

Why is the PCTV daily/weekly program schedule not listed  on the City's site? Some of us don't use Facebook and can't even get reruns.

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you! -- Pericles (430 B.C.)

That is most evident at most levels including local ones. Politicians are interested in two things; staying in office and their personal agendas, not good government. They need your vote if you come out, but in localities where there is a local machine they do not wish for large turnouts for Presidential or State elections because too many who vote the might vote  at the next primary and drown their “party regulars” votes.

This has been most evident at Council meetings, budget hearings, and the recent “Village” and Muhlenberg Town Halls.

The sincerity of Councilors who claim to be acting in favor of the poor taxpayer seems to be motivated by (1) reducing their own payments and (2) obstructing any positive action by an administration that is not beholden to the party leader, (3) supporting 100% actions by cooperative party members,

Some of the results in the past have been a grossly understaffed administrative workforce in critical areas such as essential administrators (CFO),Health officers, code inspectors and enforcement of codes to mention a few, grant writers etc.

However it seems that throughout the first four months of this administration we have heard from Council one constant; “we can’t afford it”. Not once is how can we get the services we need even if it means a slight increase in taxes.

This from a Council that is annually charges with reviewing the Administrated budget and making adjustments; a Council that because “it doesn’t understand the budget process hires its special consultant even though there  are experts including for a change a CFO to help with explanations.

Yes for the past two years the Council did employ a Consultant; but that was because that Administration had no required CFO in place.

A disturbing statement I am told made by the Consultants for the Muhlenberg Campus; “We are here to advice on rezoning the campus”. I thought they were employed to recommend how the property could be used to satisfy Plainfield’s needs.

EXCUSE

Once again delayed by other time consuming action. This time was an accident; I found the tape on the Council Budget hearing on Health Office. Absolutely disturbing and should be a concern of every resident.
We have been saving money by not filling essential jobs and under-staffing services. Only about 1/3rd food establishments were inspected  last year; one example. We are ripe for the next cholera or dysentery or typhoid or hepatitis epidemic because the Councilors have been only interested in lowering their taxes, not in controlling the expenses.

Where was a CFO the past few years? Who signed off on purchases or transfers of funds?

OBSERVATIONS

Tuesday April 29, 2014 may go down in history as the day when people which started with no new postings by any of the “daily bloggers”!

In part that may be from a lack of new local material, or just plain writer’s fatigue. In my case it is a combination of both plus a planned one or multiple part essay on Health Care which has  be repeatedly delayed by more pressing items has been confused and made  in part irreverent by up to date negative revelations which such Obama supporters as the New York Times have been publishing daily.

For my part, I can only find an unqualified positive note in that so sort of care will be available to many more people. Quality may be damned, but does not seem to matter to the eggheads who would socialize health care and those recipients who know no better.

That is only a part of my dilemma it writing on the subject, much of which I have repeatedly touch on in previous blogs.   

The TV media news broadcasts from the cable channels have deteriorated into propaganda broadcasts from either the reactionary “god fearing” right; or the everything you have belongs to all liberals.

The network base stations need to fill a  30 minutes to an hour time slot which they do with multiple repeated reports of shootings, murders, disasters and a small mattering of  too often slanted national or international news.

Those programs abound with shills for network programs or other products of the corporation ownership.   Particularly galling to me is the forced so called humor and “spontaneous” laughter on all of the programs. How about the community cooking episodes on many of the “news shows”.

Where have the serious factual news broadcasts gone?

The biggest news these days is the Donald Sterling Tapes which are being repeatedly played; first in a so called 9 minute version and most recently in a 15 minute version.

The contents of those tapes are certainly reprehensible and if true whatever legal or organizational action possible to punish him should be instigated.

Sterling has been accused of bigotry before. But there are questions about the discussions that are being ignored. How was the tape made? Was it a setup? Was D.Stiviano wired for the hour long conversation that supposedly took place?

Stiviano herself on the tape reminds the man that she is of "mixed" race and part black.

In another part of the recording she says she is "black and Mexican."

This is from a woman who is being sued by Sterling’s wife as having being Sterling’s mistress (selective bigotry) and having taken fiscal advantage of millions of dollars from an 80 year old man.

That in itself might cause suspicion about the tapes contents, Who leaked it? If the tapes have been altered or edited? What we are being told may not be the truth of the conversation. Only a review of the entire tape will answer some of the doubts. 
At about 2pm the NBA announced that Sterling had acknowledge that it was his voice on the tapes. He has been suspended for life from the franchise operation  and fined 2 million dollars-the league's max. The owners b y a 3/4 vote can force him to sell the club.

The point is don’t jump to judgment without all the facts. In America we too often forget that one is innocent until proven guilty. That like politicians have known it is very easy to destroy an opponent by anonymously seeding false accusations which are difficult to deny.

TODAY AND YOM HASHOAH

This was posted late last night and has been amended by addition.
Monday the 28^th is a day of remembrance celebrated in Israel and by Jews worldwide. Like all Jewish Holidays it starts at ’sunset the night before and end at sunset of that day.

It is called Yom Hashoah a day of remembrance of all those killed in the Holocaust; the genocide of the 6 million Jews killed systematically by the Nazis as well as the millions others; Gypsies, the infirmed, Polish and Russian civilians. His does not count the millions of Russians murdered by the Stalin regime.

“Part of the informal “service” which in different congregations varies from nothing to just members lighting a memorial candle in their home, to in some a locally devised service.

This is a memorial for that which occurred over 70 years ago. Those that were involved are in their 80s or 90s and many today deny that such horrors existed and WWII is just an inconsequential memory.

Unfortunately, today Putin’s Russia appears to be on a similar path that led to that war. Adventurism based on a belief that the other nations will not risk an armed conflict.

Hitler started in 1936 by e militarizing the Rhineland. In March1938 he annexed Austria and held a plebiscite to confirm it. In September with Chamberlain’s “Peace in our time” Munich treaty he absorbed Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland because the population was “ethnically German”.

In March 1939 he broke the treaty and declared the Provinces of Bohemia and Moravia to be German protectorates and facilitated Slovakia’s independence.

In the East he annexed part of Lithuania to East Prussia and because it was separated from Germany by Polish territory demanded that part of Poland. When denied he signed a treaty with Stalin to split Poland and then invaded that Country.

That final action led Britain and France to declare war on Germany and for a while there was the “phony war” known as “Sitzkrieg” in the west.

Between 1994 and 1999 Russia has militarily reassert it control over the Chechen republic which had broken away from the Soviet nation.

In 2008 Putin assisted the Georgian Province of South Ossetia to “break away from Georgia just as it had done some 10 years earlier with Abkhazia just south of Sochi. Although not formally annexed Russian troops are there.

The recent Crimea annexation and the threat to the eastern remaining portion of the Ukraine by using armed separatists has an excuse to send in troops to protect those ethnic Russians is a similar Hitlerism adventure which has  the danger of leading to a war that no one in  Europe wants.

What we all seem to ignore is that since 1950 there have been at least 17 documented cases of Genocide not including the 1975 Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia where an estimated 2 million were killed in the  “Killing Fields”.

Among the list of Genocides most of which have only evoked a “tsk tsk from the European/American world are:

• ·      First Rwanda during 1962-63 when during the independence move from Burundi the Hutus majority slaughter the Tutsi. Later in Burundi over 200,000 Hutus were killed and the subsequent Rwanda 1994 Hutus retribution when 800000 Tutsis and about a total of 1,174,000 civilians were killed in a 100 day period.

 

•   The Sudan first from 1955-72 and then from 1983-2005 with known death during the latter period of about 2 million non-Muslims.

• ·      In 1971 when Bangladesh then known as East Pakistan sought its independence up to 5 million were killed by Pakistan forces.

• ·      The systematic slaughter of Indians in Brazil from 1957 to 1968. And in 1970-72 in Paraguay the killing and displacing of the Ache Indians.

• ·      During China’s “Great Leap Forward” the murder of hundreds of thousand native Tibetans.

• ·      Between 1967-70 over a million mostly Igbo were killed in Nigeria.

• ·      Between 1965-67 the rightist revolutionary Indonesian government killed about 500000 Communists and leftists.

• ·      At present in Darfur once again the Christian minority has been force from its homes and killed or starved. The refugee camps do receive some but not enough “Western” aid.

• ·      We hear of the millions in North Korea who have died of starvation since 1990 and about 1 million in its political camps.

• ·      Perhaps in some small way was the UN peace keeping attempts  in Bosnia/Herzegovina in  the mid-90s an attempt to protect the Muslim minority yet it did not stop the Srebrenica massacre when 7000 Muslim men and up to 30000 civilians were killed.

The list goes on and on; still the so called civilized world only talks but never takes a cohesive action because self-interests takes precedence over human life.

We have focused mainly on the atrocities committed by the Germans in WWII but ignore the equally repulsive ones of the Japanese armies starting from its Korea-Manchuria-China adventures to its drive to the South Pacific through the Philippines and Singapore.

There were massacres everywhere some brutal stabbings as well as prison camps devoted to human experimentation and the development of germ warfare.

All have been well documented and can be looked up on the Internet.

My point is that we condone genocide by not interacting due to a fear of warfare and perhaps atomic repercussions. Sooner or later we will be faced with that reality because of a lack of firmness early on.