and they call it progress

Every so often I peruse the headlines. Today I saw three, one after the other, that caught my eye. The first,

Hiring freeze could hurt park programs in Hunterdon

and the second:

Hunterdon's third Walmart opens soon on former Flemington Fairgrounds, will hire 300

and the third:

Foster Wheeler eliminates 50 engineering jobs at Hunterdon County location

So we have eliminated high paying jobs and replaced them with six times more low paying jobs and we think this is good? The Walmart article says that they are having trouble finding enough employees. Yet, the parks department reports that they will need to compromise their summer programming because they are understaffed. All this in light of the unemployment rate in NJ is 9.3%, and those are just the people receiving unemployment, not the people whose benefits have run out and still have not found work.

Is another Walmart really needed? Does the import of plastic crap from China really merit the creation of 300 jobs? Why on earth does this business seem to be thriving while children's education is being compromised and demand for the boiler systems used in American energy systems has gone down? Are we not consuming more and more energy each day? Well something here doesn't add up and as usual Walmart is in the middle, or the top of it.

Let the Garden Begin

Seems like a funny thing to be saying mid-August. Most people are eating the harvest, enjoying their tomatoes if the late season blight didn't obscure them from the face of the earth, and beginning to wonder when this year's first frost will be. Not I and a few others here in Hunterdon County; we have finally gotten the borough's approval to break ground on the community gardening project we started in February.

We have been given a less than ideal garden location. There is much shade, a bit wet (though everything is this year), and its tucked out of the way, not accessible by most residents without a motor vehicle. Tomorrow we begin to address our challenges.