today’s news and information gleanings from here and there!

Quote for today… “Pandering Sycophants is a better explanation to what they do.” – Commenter to this Harrisburg Patriot-News article about the mayor’s clamor for modernization of that city’s building use codes. Are codes people the same everywhere?

• Fourth Friday this evening

• “Just a reminder of the curfew hours in Columbia Borough. Sunday to Thursday 10pm to 6am. Friday and Saturday is 11pm to 6am. This is for anyone under the age of 18.” – Columbia Police Department facebook page

• Good job of reporting: “10 things to know about Columbia’s sale of its wastewater assets” – MyColumbiaNews

• A bunch of Columbia addresses listed at the Sheriff Sale listing here and  in the two plus pages of Sheriff Sales listed in today’s daily newspaper.

• Follow the Projects of Columbia’s Housing Steering Committee here.

• This is nutz – why are we paying for their wars? – zerohedge.com

• In hospitals, as with banks, it’s eat or be eaten” – Hershey Med and PinnacleHealth to combine – Harrisburg Patriot-News

• In today’s Intelligencer Journal/Lancaster New Era, the “scribbler” has written about World War I veterans including Columbia native, Lieutenant General Daniel B. Strickler. We met and spoke with the General one day years ago at a downtown Lancaster club. The General was a colonel with the 28th Infantry Division during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. His leadership actions were highlighted in a book we’d just read, Follow Me And Die: The Destruction of An American Division in World War II. The book identified the horrible “at the top” leadership in the 28th Infantry during that period, but recognized General Strickler for his actions. This excerpt from another source, speaks to his actions: “By the evening of the second day of the offensive, the only organized resistance east of the Clerf was in Consthum, where the 110th’s executive officer, Colonel Daniel Strickler, had assembled the scattered remnants of the 110th’s 3rd Battalion, the 447th Anti-Aircraft Battalion, and some 105mm howitzers from the 109th and 687th Field Artillery battalions along the ridges that flanked the town. With help from the rest of the 687th Field Artillery back at Wiltz, Strickler’s force now pounded the tanks and infantry of Panzer Lehr.”

When we asked the General about his actions described in the book, his comment was, “Lies, damn lies.” The General was a direct-speaking, gruff “brown-boot” soldier, and we liked that then and now.

• The series about Columbia that’s been appearing at LancasterOnLine is extremely well-written and has been generating volumes of comments following each piece and on facebook. Awareness, identification and recognition may start the process that will ignite the community’s fire. “How poverty affects the classroom.”

• What is oppression? Is insular (ignorant of or uninterested in cultures, ideas, or peoples outside one’s own experience) leadership simply oppression? Does Iris Marion Young’s classic “Faces of Oppression” apply? “In its traditional usage, oppression means the exercise of tyranny by a ruling group. Yet, oppression creates injustice in other circumstances as well. People are not always oppressed by cruel tyrants with bad intentions. In many cases, a well-intentioned liberal  society can place system-wide constraints on groups and limit their freedom. Oppression can be the result of a few people’s choices or policies that cause embedded unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols. These societal rules can become an restrictive structure of forces and barriers that immobilize and reduce a group or category of people.” Young Summarized.

• Note to school board presidents everywhere: It’s either unique or it’s not! “‘Unique’ singles out one of a kind. That ‘un’ at the beginning is a form of ‘one.’ A thing is unique (the only one of its kind) or it is not. Something may be almost unique (there are very few like it), but nothing is ‘very unique.’ It can’t be ‘very unique!’” – Common Errors in English Usage

• “The Columbia Consolidated Fire Department will host a fireworks display Saturday night around 10:15 on fire company grounds, 10th and Mifflin streets. The display caps off a festival that opens Tuesday and continues daily beginning at 6 p.m. Admission is free.” Fireworks aficionados can find a listing of area fireworks here. – LancasterOnLine [Or should we have said “affection Atos?“]

Clever sign posted by a commenter to a LancasterOnLine facebook post.

• Columbia Antique, Art & Craft Show – Saturday – LancasterOnLine

• Someone else fingers Toomey! A letter-to-the editor writer in today’s Intelligencer Journal/Lancaster New Era has the courage to point out that Toomey is just one more a glad-handing politician who always want his picture taken with veterans but never supports veterans programs. In retrospect, we should have voted for Sestak, the veteran. The writer says, “Toomey should be embarrassed about his consistent and negative voting record against us veterans.” Know what, our politicians do not know the meaning of the word “embarrassed.”

• Love this quote from Nicholas Kristof’s column: “If there’s one thing we should have learned in the Bush/ Cheney years, it’s that swagger and invasion are overrated as foreign policy instruments.”