Hate

Hate.  Where does it come from?  I ask that question because I have never experienced that emotion.  Does it come from the feeling that someone or group, other than the hater or the hater’s group, is getting something that the hater thinks they do not deserve?

Does it come from years or decades or centuries of a built up resentment, a constant telling of lies about the “other” group?

Anyway, the question is, “How many years has this been going on and will it ever end?”

Vandals destroyed a monument to victims of a World War Two pogrom against Jews in Poland, covering it with racist inscriptions and swastikas in green paint, police said on Thursday.

It was the latest in a recent series of racist and xenophobic acts of vandalism targeting the small Jewish and Muslim communities in eastern Poland as well as the tiny Lithuanian minority.

At least 340 Jews were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in a barn in the 1941 pogrom in the eastern town of Jedwabne. The site was later turned into a memorial.

“On Wednesday a police patrol ran into the devastated site. We immediately started an investigation,” said Andrzej Baranowski, police spokesman in the nearby city of Bialystok.

Vandals also smeared a wall surrounding the memorial with signs saying “I’m not sorry for Jedwabne” and “They were highly flammable.” They obscured the Hebrew and Polish signs on the memorial itself with paint.

“This is a perfect example of vandalism and stupidity, but we don’t know the exact motives yet,” Baranowski added.

All the recent anti-Semitic and xenophobic incidents were probably perpetrated by the same people, Poland’s interior ministry said this week, and they are all under investigation by the Bialystok police.

A 2001 Polish investigation concluded that the Jedwabne pogrom was inspired by Poland’s then-Nazi occupiers and the case remains a traumatic memory for Jews and many Poles today.

Poland was home to Europe’s largest Jewish population of some 2.5 million until World War Two, when most of its Jewish citizens perished in the Nazi-sponsored Holocaust.

The few who survived the war faced periodic oppression by the communist regime installed in Poland after 1945.

Poland is a largely homogenous Roman Catholic country but religious and ethnic minorities are more common in eastern regions near the borders with Belarus and Ukraine.

It is both sad and an outrage.  It is domestic terrorism.

We Are Doing Something Wrong

We have done a lot wrong when it is the widow who has to stand and be counted.

This is extremely sad

 Ashley Joppa-Hagemann, whose husband committed suicide in June before his ninth deployment, said her husband joined the military because of 9/11

The military is preying on these people.  Some are uber-patriotic, others can’t find a job and can’t afford college.  Some view it as a job and a way to get college paid for.

But eight deployments in less that 10 years is criminal.  Obviously, there are no 4-star Generals or Admirals standing up for the troops for which they have a grave responsibility.

Makes Me Wonder

Since 1968, this country has had a Democrat for president for about 14.5 years (Carter 4, Clinton 8, Obama 2.5) and Republican for president for 28 years (Nixon/Ford 8, Reagan 8, Bush 4, Bush Jr 8).

And this is where the United States stands in the world:

 

Unabashedly borrowed from Suburban Guerrilla.

Tragic

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting this bit of tragic and sad news that has been overshadowed by the rainstorm that hit New York.

There is far more going on that is unknown and therefore not included in this story.  I refuse to speculate.

A Horrible Situation

This is a real situation.  This happened to my niece and her husband on Wednesday the third of August, this year.   Three and a half weeks ago.

He is 49 years old, she a few years younger.  They were riding their motorcycle, apparently obeying all applicable traffic laws, when a lady, who was later arrested at the scene for being under the influence, ran a stop sign. Where upon the motorcycle struck the car at a high rate of speed.  The sudden stopping of the bike caused both my niece and her husband to fly through the air some distance.

Both were air-evac’ed to a hospital about 30 miles from the accident scene.

Niece suffered the worst damage.  Multiple skull fractures and multiple fractures of the left leg.  He lost most of or virtually all the soft tissue and tendons on the back of the upper left leg.

Niece was in a medically induced coma for about 11 days.  The doctors wanted minimal brain activity so the swelling would go down.  In order to reduce brain activity, they inserted a breathing tube.

Both were self employed at their own business, no health insurance and neither was wearing a helmet.  Ohio does not have a mandatory helmet law for adults.

The estimate is that she will be, at a minimum, six months in hospital. He has been transferred to another hospital awaiting donor tissue in the attempt to repair his leg.

How long before either of them will be out of hospital, there are no estimates.

Who pays all the medical bills?  How do they support themselves?  Will they ever, especially my niece, be able to work again?  If she does not have the mental or physical capacity to work, how does she survive?  Dose she go in a “facility” with Social Security picking up the tab?

I’m sure that if the lady that caused the accident had insurance, her insurance company will have to fork over some money up to the limits of her policy.  And the hospital can also go after the lady that caused the accident.

My Niece’s mom & dad are approaching seventy.  They cannot take care of her full time.  And her husband has no family except a son by a previous marriage and after a year in Iraq with the USMC, he’s not all here.

I don’t have a lot of answers for a situation like this.

Hurricanes

My experience with hurricanes:

1. I spent the first 14 years of my life in Trumbull, Connecticut, a suburb of Bridgeport.  The house we lived in was on the side of a hill.  Looking down towards the north corner of White Plains Road and Unity Road was a large barn.  I was maybe six or seven at the time.  Of course, at the time, I was to young to understand what a hurricane was but all of a sudden the big barn was flat on the ground, blown in a north-easterly direction.  On that corner now is the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church.
2. A decade plus later I was in the U. S. Navy stationed on a destroyer, USS John W. Weeks (DD-701), in Norfolk, Virginia.  A hurricane was approaching so all Navy ships in the area went to their assigned anchorages in the Hampton Roads roadstead.  The wind blew but the anchor held and the bow was always facing into the wind.
3. Summer of 1962 – Don’t do anything stupid like body surfing in the pre-storm surge like I did back off Ocean View, VA.

That is the sum of my direct experience with hurricanes.  Not the brightest thing one could do, swimming in the pre-storm surge and not something I would recommend or do again.

Not A New Idea

Most people date this neo-conservative movement to the first Reagan administration.

I agree that it is about that time but I see the beginning (of the neo-con movement) being the people behind the U.S. going off the Bretton Woods agreement.  So, instead of governments setting monetary policy, the big banking houses did.

And, things slowly went down hill for the middle-class in the United States.

Then along comes NAFTA negotiated by George H. W. Bush’s administration.  Followed by CAFTA in 2004.  And the middle class got a little worse off.

But the accelerator, the gas on the fire as to how we got here was the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore.

If the recount in Florida was allowed to go on, some say Gore would have won and very possibly the wasteful decade of the oughts would have turned out differently.

New To Me

I just came across this today.  Kind of a clearing house where somebody has already checked out folks running under the Dem banner.

Here is one close to me  (I’m in the Ohio 8th CD)

Connie Pillich

OH-01 (map)

You can read Connie’s strong guest editorial about standing up to John Kasich and his reactionary Republicans’ attack on working families and watch her passionate defense of women’s right to choice here.

More Thomas Paine

From Rights of Man by Thomas Paine.

Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolised from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race.  Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world?

Quarrels = wars

Excess debts and taxes = ways to pay for the quarrels.

Military Retirement

Update below

AP had this story up a few days ago.  It is difficult to count the ways this story is misleading.  First, here are the first two paragraphs:

It sounds like a pretty good deal: Retire at age 38 after 20 years of work and get a monthly pension of half your salary for the rest of your life. All you have to do is join the military.
As the nation tightens its budget belt, the century-old military retirement system has come under attack as unaffordable, unfair to some who serve and overly generous compared with civilian benefits.

By the use of the word “work” it is plainly obvious that the author has never served in the military and really has no clue as to what military service is all about.