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How not to prepare for a pandemic

In Pennsylvania millions of chickens with bird flu have had to be killed. This is happening all over the country as there were 66 confirmed cases of bird flu in the United States in 2024. One person died, and four have been hospitalized. Bird (Avian) Flu is real and gathering momentum. Meanwhile Trump has fired 1300 employees at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and instructed them to stop issuing health advisories. When President last term, Trump repeatedly downplayed the threat of Covid which eventually killed over a million Americans. He rejected science, instead recommended ...

Work for cleaner water

Let’s add cleaner Pennsylvania waters to the list of stuff Gov. Josh Shapiro and legislators have gotten done in the past two years. Governor Shapiro’s words echoed around the watershed when he spoke about Chesapeake Bay restoration last summer saying, “We are making sure Pennsylvania does its fair share. Pennsylvania is all in.” Thanks to elected leaders budgeting $50 million annually to the Clean Streams Fund and Agriculture Conservation Assistance Program (ACAP) cost-share, farmers will put more projects on the ground that reduce pollution to local waters. The funding ...

‘It’s a good life’

This is yet another Twilight Zone Episode that has become chillingly relevant in the Trump Era. Anthony Fremont, a six-year-old, possesses unlimited mental powers including mind reading and telepathy. He wields absolute control over his family and residents of the small town where they live. The result is absolute hell, as everyone around him must act, even think, “good things,” or get twisted into god-awful monsters, or worse, “sent to the cornfield,” in other words murdered. Bottom line, power corrupts, and character is the element of leadership that keeps it in check, or ...

City Hall

When the city was first soliciting offers to purchase City Hall, I walked through it with the then city engineer. At that time, he told me that his opinion was that it would take $3-6M to upgrade the building to the point where city employees could safely move back in. He also told me that was in line with what two commercial contractors had estimated. It looked look a very feasible rehab. The February 22nd article here cited an estimate from BKV Group of $28M. That may be for a top-of-the line retrofit, with the custom renovations desired by each department. It seems likely it can be ...

Pennsylvania being left behind

Three years ago, when Texas lost power in the middle of an extremely cold winter, my son – who lives in Austin – had to crawl into his sleeping bag in front of the fireplace to keep warm. We now know that the power failure, which killed 200+ people, resulted from problems not with renewables but with the state’s natural gas infrastructure, as power plants stopped running and gas-lines froze. This year, during another cold spell, the power has stayed on in Texas due to an increase in wind power as well as solar and battery capacity. Solar projects increased in Texas, beginning ...

Making America holy again

If Christians understood our Constitution, I think the churches providing cover for illegal immigrants would be close to nonexistent. If these churches understood The Word of God, they would not be flagrant lawbreakers of our laws for protection and security. The churches of today are not the churches of our founding. Pastors made sure their people knew their constitutions (state and federal), and the Declaration of Independence, because they are the frameworks for law and order; based on Biblical Christianity and the Judeo-Christian ethic. The Founders and generations after ...