Refs Throw Syracuse Game to Ohio State

In what seemed to be an obvious gambling scheme the refs took over the Syracuse Ohio State Game and made strategic calls to give Ohio State the game. Syracuse was helpless as they fouls were called more than two to one against them. Will an investigation follow, will the NCAA have the balls to look into their conduct.
      The refs neutered Syracuse's offense by decimating them with fouls early and often hitting 5 Syracuse players with 4 fouls and turning a blind eye to foul after foul by Ohio State. With no Offense left Syracuse did its best but the odds were to stiff to overcome and so the fix was in from the starting tap to the final whistle even as the Commissioner of the NCAA sat and watched mum, as Syracuse's coach pleaded to him for one call.
     Perhaps this was the NCAA's punishment for Syracuse's coach rebuking the press for questioning his coaching abilities. In any case, tonight basketball suffered a black eye no less significant than the Black Sox scandal in Chicago. This time it was not the players but the referees who shaped the NCAA tournament brackets. CBS soft sold the result, as always, knowing that the tournament has sway over their coverage rights. All in all a very disappointing display. College Basketball needs a a new Governing body, because the one they have has created a system that is biased against the athletes and the coaches, who do not garner as much respect as others.
      An example of this is making an obviously mediocre team like Duke a 2 seed in the NCAA after being blown out twice in one season by teams that didn't make the tournament or were bounced themselves. The ACC has become a dead zone for talented teams due too the bias referees show Duke and North Carolina. They should be paying Syracuse to join so they can gain at least a shadow of competitiveness in their league. Other conferences have been decimated by the same problems. Student athletes no longer want to play on, what is a predetermined loser team.
     Basketball has now gone the way of college football which is a farce. Predetermined teams are ranked and and the outcome  follows the rankings unless a tragic injury occurs. The facts is that colleges probably collude to recruit some kids and not others. March Madness is just about the gambling now and the billions of dollars it brings. Teams get home court advantage in the ACC since Raleigh has become what seems to be a permanent site. It would be highly unlikely to see a city like Cincinnati get to be a NCAA site much less the city of a mid major. With the weakness of the PAC 10 the furthest the NCAA goes now is the Midwest.
     As for the athletes, they are the pawns in big a money Ponzie scheme that forbids them to live above the poverty level. God forbid they should get a cut of the millions, that the schools are splitting and advertisers are sucking in, based on their ability to play a sport.
     I went away from football because of the inevitability of the results of the season and the lack of a real National Champion. I guess I will go away from college basketball now, as it has become a farce too. When hype means more than  the game it is time to turn the game off.
     Regardless of the scandals that hit Syracuse, the players on Syracuse should not haved suffered. The school should be fined if it found to have violated rules. The athletes shouldn't suffer.
     As for the cover ups, I have no doubt they exist in every college or University since the economics of sports is so crucial to those institutions. The win at all costs attitude pervades big time college sports. The NCAA rules seem to exist now to keep the athletes from sharing in the prophets, and not to keep them as amatures for the purpose of keeping money from influencing the high dollar sports. It is a laugh that colleges and Universities have decided to raise standards for the athletes educationally when they themselves have turned into intuitions of prostitution, profiting from student loans and rising tuition that bars kids access to a secondary education or robs them of the ability to pay to finish it. It is more sad that it turns kids into indentured servants to the banks and the government and prevents them from living debt free.
     I realize I have extrapolated from a basketball game to a much larger and broader area, but it is really the whole system that is corrupt and the basketball game is just the overtly public corruption that can be observed. Its just a very sad state of affairs in a big picture that has become even sadder.
     My advice to those stuck in that system is simply to not participate in it.
       What if every student in the whole country said I am taking next year off. What do you think would happen to the tuition rates and the interest on loans and the institutional power? It would fall that's what. Instead of students begging to get in, those institutions would be begging them to come back,. much as the credit card companies beg you to get a card if people cut theirs up and stop charging. Banks would beg if people pulled their money out and refused to participate in their system.
      Some uneducated people might think that I propose communism, but what i propose is simply being a good consumer. People should know if what they are buying has the value that it is priced at and if it doesn't they should simply decide not to purchase it. We wait for things to go on sale, but we don't wait for everything to go on sale. We need to wait for a sale on everything we use and buy. If you can't pay for it in your life time a thing has no value unless your kids will benefit. You can't leave an education to your kids, its impractical for them to wait til their 50 to get it and it doesn't work that way. In your life you'll pay more fees to the bank than you'll ever get in services. I suggest a post office box and postal orders instead. It doesn't pay interest but neither does the bank and you can probably trust the post office more than the bank.
                                            Think about it, why pay some one to hold your money for the month. Hell I would hold it for free. Would you hold someones money for free if you could use it for a while and give it to them when they want it? Why pay someone to save your money. True story a friend put 50 dollars in a savings account for a rainy day. When that rainy day came a few months later she went to the bank to get it. The account was empty. Why? Guess! The bank had charged a fee every month til it was cleaned out. Poof it was gone. It would have been safer buried in a box in the ground. People used to do that ya know. Just saying.

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It's time to Split New York State

Image by wallyg via Flickr

Upstate NY knows that the interests of downstate NY are separated by a huge rift. Downstate votes laws that have no benefit for upstate, but they are forced to pay for them. Downstate doesn't even like upstate NY. They snobbishly consider themselves the only part of NY that counts, so it's time to split New York State and allow Upstate NY to persue it's own course. If votes were decided on geographical area upstate would win every vote, but they have the majority of the people. They also cost the state the majority of the money it costs to run the state. So let us have our land, which downstate doesn't care about and have a government that is truly responsive to us. It's time for north and south NY. Just like the Carolinas.
That worked out fine for both halves of the Carolinas and it will work out just as well for north and south NY. Upstate is a totally different environment from downstate and they really don't want us, so cut us loose. We can do what is economically beneficial to us and southern NY will not have to be bothered with us. It makes total sense that when two areas have nothing in common that they separate and persue their own interests. Upstate is rural with a few major cities, that with time and without the straight jacket Albany has put on it, will do quite well. It has vast natural resources and no need for people from New York City or Albany to spend a day here and there in it and decide what's in it's best interest. We don't need the PSC and The Attorney General doesn't recognize upstate, so no big deal there. The governor, the legislature and most of the agencies that should represent us are from Downstate. It makes total sense that they should deal with downstate and allow us to become a separate state that represents itself with people from our geographic region. We are best able to decide what is right for our region economically, politically, and in any other manner that need be considered.
For years upstater's have talkled about splitting the state and I think the time has come. Our issuse have nothing in common with downstate at all and their attachment to us has caused nothing but economic ruin and inconvience for us.
We do not want or need a state that is ruled by monopolies, which drain our wallets and cause the area to be economically depressed, because it is convient for downstate. We have plenty of energy, tons of land that can be developed, and a transportation corridor that is rival to none. All we need is for Albany to release the corrupt strangle hold it has on us and let us develope it. Upstate has the potential to be a tax bastion since we have a very small drain on the economic budget.We don't want or need every hair brained law and ordinance that downstate whimsically places on us.
The time has come people to do what has been socially, economically, and politically logical for decades. Simply split the state.

Erin Maxwell Case. The real Deal.

Image via WikipediaFirst of all let me explain that Erin Maxwell was a young girl who died by hanging in her room, in a house that had the filthiest conditions imaginable. The conditions she lived in were reported several times to DSS, but they failed to act. People have been told that her case is unique and that DSS did all that they could under NYS (New York State) law. The real story is that DSS has very wide powers under the law and is required to investigate a report of neglect or abuse involving a child on each occasion that a report is made.
The fact is that someone is lying in this case and some people may be guilty of violating NYS law. The Law says that a school and every employee in it must report any suspicion of child neglect or abuse to the school social worker and that the social worker must investigate and determine whether the claim has merit. If the claim has merit the school social worker must inform dss or the authorities.
In Erin's case the teacher's were providing Erin with clean clothes when she arrived at school because her clothes smelled of urine. She was seen eating out of trash cans also and there were probably other signs of neglect. This would have to be reported under the law on every occasion that it occurred and it would have to be documented by the school in writing. So far there is no record of this being done and if it was done and reported to DSS in Oswego County the County would have to investigate the claims thoroughly after each incident.
Erin's case with DSS in Oswego county had been closed and no one was investigating her living conditions. Point blank, someone here either lied or violated New York State Law, because DSS has stated that they had no reports about Erin in the year before her death. In any case people who knew Erin from outside the school have said that they reported her situation to DSS. The bottom line is that under the law DSS was obligated to investigate under NYS law if anything was reported by the school or people who had knowledge of Erin.
A S>U> professor has weighed in and said that Erin's case is out of the ordinary. An aberration in the system. It is true that Erin's living conditions were an isolated case, becasuse of the severity, but I know that children are regularly kept in their homes in Onondaga County when their living conditions are not appropriate. I worked for the City school district for many years and know that there were many occasions where reports were made to the social worker and DSS. The bottom line is that children are living in unacceptable conditions right now and, because these cases aren't allowed to be made public children suffer every day.
This is the states dirty little secret and it will never be addressed until it is brought out into the open. DSS should not be allowed to monitor itself. Everycase should be reviewed by an independent source to determine if appropriate action has been taken.
As for Erin's death, their is a definite possibility that she killed herself, because she was trapped in the living conditions she was exposed to and locked in her room from the outside on a regular basis. I have been involved with children who have tried to kill themselves as young as 9 years old and it is not as rare as some may think. Erin must have known that many people knew about her living conditions and she also must have known that no one was helping to change them. Imagine being locked in a room in a house filled with animal feces from wall to wall. A house where there were hundreds of cats and animals routinely died. Imagine that some of those animal were in the freezer. Is it hard to imagine that someone caught in this situation might consider suicide. Imagine how hopeless she must have been. I think that suicide is not a factor that can be ignored in this case. My belief is that the state police did not want the attention that her suicide would bring, so they charged her brother on very little or no evidence at all. No DNA or anything else that would connect him to her death, except that he was in the house when it occurred.
As to the premise that people who are suicidal speak about it, this is a total misconception. The majority of suicides are unexpected and come with no signs at all that the person was going to kill themselves. I know several people who killed themselves and it always came as a surprise. Most people who really want to die don't advertise, because they don't want to be stopped. This is a fact that most psychiatrist can tell you.

New York State Tanks

In a message carried across the state Governor Patterson has stated that in 90 days New York's budget Deficit has risen by over a billion dollars. He has called for the state Representatives to return to Albany on August 29th to begin to work on the crisis. The trouble is that these politicians couldn't agree to get into a bunker in case of a nuclear attack. So far every budget has been agreed upon in backroom deals that cover up who is getting what. One thing New Yorkers can be sure of is that someones palm is getting greased. The trouble for the state has just begun. Even a person who has a cursory knowledge of the states income sources knows that as the stock market continues to lose ground and banks write off billions in losses New York's revenue stream will dry up even more. The party is over and the state has just woken up with a hangover, but this hangover is guaranteed to last years. New York's habit has always been to throw money at it's problems rather than fix them. Those days are over. Not only has throwing money at the problem been unsuccessful, but it has resulted in soaring budgets. With the state carved up into political territories and budgets being based on who wields the power, New york seems to be unwilling or unable to address the root of it's problems, which is that every program is a sacred cow to someone. My advice to anyone thinking of investing in New York is to run very fast, because it is almost a sure bet that the states bond rating will tank too.