This year David asked for help getting the word out, the following is from his site.

Halloween is just around the corner.  Every year I’ve run my event, people invariably say, “If you need help next year, let me know.”

Well, if I’m going to do this again for 2011,  I need your help.

Specifically, I’m looking for a few volunteers to participate during the event.   Participation involves working a section of the event, sometimes with a little theatrics, but mostly to guide people through or give them a scare.

I’m contemplating running the event on Friday the 28th and Saturday the 29th, and definitely on Monday the 31st.

We currently run the event like this with people manning these locations:

Main entrance / exit:

Two people.  One person manages incoming people, the other passes out treats and handles Foodbank donations.

Mad Scientist Lab:

One person(as a lab assistant [think Igor]) to accompany animatronic doctor, and add some flair to the display, while making sure things aren’t touched, and people move on to the next section.

Illusion / Clown room:

Two – Three people. One to two people to perform the illusion (no skill necessary), and one to throw in an unexpected scare.

Additionally, it looks like we’ve lost our chainsaw guy this year.  While I like and respect the guy who did it (my ex-brother in law) I never much cared for the noise and running around.  However, if anyone has a chainsaw without the chain installed and wants to throw on a mask and chase the teens around occasionally, I welcome you.

Of course, zombies, ghouls, ghosts, and creatures of all sorts are welcome to roam the yard and scare attendees.  And,  if someone is truly brave enough and doesn’t suffer from claustrophobia, I invite you to spend the evening lying down in an open casket, scaring the unwitting visitors.

I have several available costumes and masks, and lots of makeup, however, having your own costume / mask is great.  Lastly, volunteers must be at least 21 years old.  No alcoholic beverages may be consumed on the day(s) of or during the event.

So, if you’d like to help out a good cause and have some fun, contact my Halloween partner, Robbie, via email or telephone at (860) 953-4785, or leave a comment and let us know which nights you’re available and what you’d like (or don’t want) to do.

One final note. If I don’t have enough help, I can’t run the event in full, meaning some displays may be closed, or I may not run it at all — so please pitch in to have some fun, and help out the Foodbank.

Student loan debt, now at $830 billion, has surpassed credit card debt—a statement not likely to have been heard 20 years ago. Student loans, unlike any other form of debt, CANNOT be forgiven via bankruptcy—these loans MUST be repaid. Is this the next bubble to burst?

Personally I think we will see our young fleeing the country to escape their debt.  Scroll half down and see who benefits from this debt, not only are we burdening our young with the Federal and State debts, we are backdoor using them as a source of income.  We sell them the dream, you’ve heard it over and over again on TV and radio, “people with degrees make…….. more than those who don’t”, and by the way we will help finance your dream.   But do they really?  Who is commissioning those studies and who is performing those studies?  Perhaps those who benefit from increasing student enrollment?  Perhaps.

The young don’t understand the soul crushing burden of debt, what’s a 100,000$ to a 18 year old?  What is truely scary is how many loans are made to 2 year college students that don’t finish, you got the debt and no degree.

And for many with degrees an economy in recession with few new jobs.

Why are you not supprised?

Judge for yourself.  This is the actual language.
Standard And Poors Report.

Some highlights.  That I think represent the tone and bring out the points the media as usual is missing.

My take, S&P reduced the rating because:

1) Recent events in Washington have left S&P doubtful congress can act effectively to deal with the financial problems facing the country.

2) The recent agreement is not adequate.

3) The timing of the next election makes it unlikely a significant agreement will be reached, the debt issue will be worse and require tougher measures.

4) Political  leaders have shown no intention of tackling Medicare and Medicate or

other entitlements programs.

5) S&P takes no position of what mixture of revenue raising or spending cuts is appropriate.

From the report.

The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective,
and less predictable than what we previously believed.

The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy. Despite this year’s wide-ranging debate, in our view, the differences between political parties have proven to be extraordinarily difficult to bridge, and, as we see it, the resulting agreement fell well short of the comprehensive fiscal consolidation program that some proponents had envisaged until quite recently.

Republicans and Democrats have only been able to agree to relatively modest savings on discretionary spending while delegating to the Select Committee decisions on more comprehensive measures.

It appears that for now, new revenues have dropped down on the menu of policy options. In addition, the plan envisions only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal  sustainability. Our opinion is that elected officials remain wary of tackling the structural issues required to effectively address the rising U.S. public debt burden in a manner consistent with a ‘AAA’ rating and with ‘AAA’ rated sovereign peers.

In our view, the difficulty in framing a consensus on fiscal policy weakens the government’s ability to manage public finances and diverts attention from the debate over how to achieve more balanced and dynamic economic growth in an era of fiscal stringency and private-sector deleveraging (ibid). A new political consensus might (or might not) emerge after the 2012 elections, but we believe that by then, the government debt burden will likely be higher, the needed medium-term fiscal adjustment potentially greater, and the inflection point on the U.S. population’s demographics and other age-related spending drivers closer at hand (see “Global Aging 2011: In The U.S., Going Gray Will Likely Cost Even More Green, Now,” June 21, 2011).

Standard & Poor’s takes no position on the mix of spending and revenue measures that Congress and the Administration might conclude is appropriate for putting the U.S.’s finances on a sustainable footing.  The act calls for as much as $2.4 trillion of reductions in expenditure growth over the 10 years through 2021. These cuts will be implemented in two steps: the $917 billion agreed to initially, followed by an additional $1.5 trillion that the newly formed Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction is supposed to recommend by November 2011. The act contains no measures to raise taxes or otherwise enhance revenues, though the committee could recommend them.

Sergeant William Gordon

On this date July 1st in 1916, 5,500 men of Ulster died in the Battle of Somme. One of them my Great Uncle Sergeant William Gordon went over the top that day never to return.

Oral family tradition holds that all of Ulster went silent as the news broke, only the weeping behind drawn shades was heard.  Ulster which is no bigger than Connecticut East of the Connecticut River suffered greatly that day. He is buried in Northern France close to where he fell. British tradition buries their fallen on the soil they fell, “forever British”, but as my Grandmother said, “The sun may never set on the British Empire, and it’s blood is on every square inch of it.”

Over The Top And Into History, For God and Ulster

Sgt Gordon was just one of many Great Uncles of mine that I would never meet who fell that day, Hewitts, Magills, Boyds, Walkers and Gordons you would not believe the numbers if I published them. Accurate stats and photographs are tough to come by, these men generally speaking had no children and few were married.

The character of the region was forever changed by this large loss of life.

The Hewitts are famous for their Lambeg drums in 2008 they assembled at the Ulster Tower in France. The memorial was built in 1920 to honour the Ulster Dead.  Almost 100 years after the war, Ulster remembers.

Hewitt Lameg Drums at the Ulster Tower

Change in Unemployment Rate By Country

By any measure this has been a hard and long recession, and many of us are not convinced it is over.  Particularly worrisome is the millions of men who have dropped off the face of employment statistics.  Men who have just disappeared.  No statistic the Federal Government keeps tracks them.  If they are working its in the cash underground or by barter or combination of or just wearing out the couch.  These men having exhausted their unemployment don’t even show in the state numbers.

Giving voice to this statistic is the Structural Unemployment number traditionally around 2%, representing the people who don’t work and aren’t looking for work, the long term unemployed.  The chart (Reuters) suggests this rate maybe more like 4.5% now twice the rate of any European country.

The share of American men aged 16 to 64 who are employed has fallen from nearly 85 percent in the early 1950s to less than 65 percent now.  This is a really big deal, millions of men have dropped out and are not participating in the American economy.  We have no experience with what the social ramifications will be, a huge rise in crime comes to mind.

Some estimates put every 1 in 5 young men out of work, and this does not include those in school, or who have part time jobs.  This is a critical time for those men, work habits are established and a career basis is formed.  The start of their life wealth is being seriously delayed, if it ever starts at all.

Chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission Tom Pauken writes:

One reason that men’s employment rate lags behind is that there has been negative growth in the types of jobs men historically have occupied. In the last 10 years, 5.5 million manufacturing jobs were lost. That’s one-third of our manufacturing base in an industry where men make up 70 percent of the workforce. In construction, where 87 percent of positions are filled by men, more than 1.4 million jobs went away during that time frame. Approximately 4.4 million jobs have been added in the education and health care sectors, but women dominate this growing field as they make up 77 percent of the work force.

Bringing manufacturing jobs home is more critical than ever, it’s a National Security issue.

Job Growth By State Since The "End" of the Reession

Regional and State Employment and Unemployment Summary (BLS.gov)

If you click on the graph to the right and expand or zoom in on Connecticut you can barely see a tiny bit of blue.  That blue represents job growth since the MAX jobs lost point during the 2007 Recession as of this past May 2011.  Note it’s the 2007 Recession and we are now obviously in 2011.  The top of the blue is the worst unemployment rate and the top of the red is where we are as of May this year.  Keep zooming in, I assure you there is SOME blue in the Connecticut bar, (yes a pun).

Also note only one state is worse in job growth.  Louisiana.

If you google.com “companies leaving Connecticut” it returns: 59,100,000 results in (0.10 seconds) including a link for this resource guide on everything you need to know, leavingconnecticut.com

To this I add, how could the housing market in Connecticut ever recover if we don’t improve our job growth?

Something I’ve said for years, the cost of shipping is considerable.  Not to mention the cost of oversight of overseas facilities. 

….He said when NCR looked at the cost of shipping products that weigh more than a ton each, as well as the need to have the plant close to the engineering staff and customers in order to constantly improve the machines, it decided to build the Georgia plant.

 NCR (NCR, Fortune 500) has already hired about 500 workers to build ATM machines and self-service checkout systems at a Columbus, Ga., plant, and it plans to add another 370 jobs by 2014, building products that were formerly produced at plants in China, Hungary and Brazil.

This trend of reshoring or insourcing is likely to grow in the coming years, as the cost gap between building overseas and building at home narrows. It’s an encouraging sign in a job market where hiring has stalled in recent months.

Counting Ballots

The number of minivans in the school parking lot was a giveaway.  The budget passed 181 Yea, to 50 Nay (or something close to that).

No drama, no questions.  Just the check in and voting.

This was the third budget vote and essentially the same budget tax increase and spending wise.  The bottom line was the same for all three votes.

The 1st and 2nd differed by a line item providing legal fee relief to residents in the Sewer District.  And I’ll not explain that, it would take a book to fully explain the ins and outs.  The 2nd and 3rd budget “essentially” in Bill Black’s words, were the same.

A exit survey was prepared in the event the budget failed.

Your July 1st tax bill will show a 2.35% tax increase over last year.

Sign in is at 6:30 PM.  Voting is expected at 7:00 PM.

Will be a paper ballot.