I just don't understand how the working republican common men and women allow their party leaders to speak for them as if to say; we’ll keep working for minimum wage and like it. Don't want to take money from big brother now, do we?

Throw them under the bus as if they are garbage. Now the democrat working men and women have to suffer too.

I saw this everyday in the dairy industry. We as producers would only get paid the very minimum that the federal orders made the companies pay. So as you all see, there are very few dairy farms left and the price of meat and milk is going higher.

The same thing will eventually happen in regular business; the small stores will go out of business whether the minimum wage goes up or not. As long as big business has no resistance from the government they can continue to hoodwink the republican business men and women in giving them their last drop of blood, sweat and tears. Keep them hoping that the economy will become a booming thing and then more folks will spend more money, hoping big brother will start more business with the extra money in their pocket!

It is a shame to see this happen now, in our tight economy. This should be a bipartisan bill with the republicans fighting as hard as others to pass the bill along, instead of just passing the buck.

Minimum does not have to mean you don't have to pay employees more. As if.

Sincerely,

Peter A. Seman

Thompson Pa.

I don’t have a dog in this race any more, even though a piece of my heart is still embedded in the hills around Susquehanna.

With a touch of sadness and even a little angst, I have read in the Transcript where the local government is thwarting an attempt to stabilize and restore the Starrucca House and cannot, for the life of me, understand why the council cannot get behind the current owner and support his efforts.

After all, what does Susquehanna have to draw the occasional visitor to town?

Can’t be the sparkling sight of Main Street with the litter of cigarette butts and candy wrappers blowing in the wind?

Can’t be the sparkling facades of the ancient buildings lining Main Street…too many holes where proud structures once stood.

Maybe it is and could be once again, the draw of buildings and places like “SR” Tower, the only Erie Railroad interlocking tower still standing between Port Jervis and east and Buffalo or Salamanca west! Or maybe, the coaling tower located at the far end of the river bridges at a place once known as “SQ”! There is (or was) one just like this in Meadville…don’t know if it still exists or not. Maybe it would be the once famous Starrucca Viaduct in Lanesboro built in 1847. Trouble with the local is that it cannot be seen or photographed easily due to the amount of trees obstructing the view. Aside from these railroad structures there is the Mormon monument and visitors area in Oakland. Now here is a clean, cared for area of visitor interest. The only one that comes to mind, I might add!

And then we have the Starrucca House…built around 1860, visited by generals and presidents, the scene of thousands of soldiers off to war and hundreds returning for the last rights. A building once heralded as the “historic” oldest brick railroad station in the state, if not the nation. A building, after the railroad left town, the folks in local office talked about tearing down…if was of no use, etc.

And now, I read in the Transcript once again of the local council placing stumbling blocks in the path of a man who, if I read it correctly, wants only to attempt to restore this historic site if he possibly can. I gather he only asks that folks get out of his way and let him get on with the project. Sadly, it would appear this is not to be.

Is it because he is an “outsider”? What could be the councils’ motive for hindering the man? What is there to gain? From my point of view, nothing!

What is there to lose? Again, from my point of view….everything! Susquehanna is a small town, way out on the edge of a vacation traveler’s map. A small dot with nothing, at this time, to draw them to visit. That could change with a little effort and help given in the right places.

This affair is reminiscent of a former Mayor Reddon’s attempt, to no avail, to restore the former Erie Shops water tank which could have been a beacon to travelers to stop and chat…..I know rail fans would have swarmed to any of these relics of the Erie Railroad’s past glory!

To borrow a line from a Hollywood film, to the residents and politicians of the Three Boros, I say: “Get busy living, or get busy dying!”

Sincerely,

Eugene P. Baker

Hornell, NY

According to our talking heads, Russian Federation President Vladimir “DeeDee” Putin has only whet his appetite with the under-handed annexation of the Crimean peninsula. His intentions with regard to the portion of Ukraine that borders on the federation are unmistakable. That particular portion is inhabited by people who speak Russian as their mother tongue.

And that fact allegedly assures President Putin he’ll enjoy as much success with regard to that portion of Ukraine as he did with Crimea. Likely enough, he presumes this about those Russian speakers. They must believe, with varying degrees of intensity, that they should live as Russians in the Russian Federation, rather than as Russian speakers in Ukraine, a foreign country.

Well, the slow and halting and broken pace of bringing that project to completion leads me to conjecture the following. Something is obstructing that project. And here is where I’m offering my opinion. So long as DeeDee is in charge of the Russian Federation, those aforementioned Russian speakers would much prefer living as somewhat sullen Ukrainian citizens to living as Russians under his thumb.

And here’s the bottom line: they detest him.

Sincerely,

A. Alexander Stella

Susquehanna, PA

For thousands of years men have sought to escape the ravages of time. Chinese emperors sent expeditions around the world to find a life-extending potion, medieval alchemists tried to create the philosopher’s stone that held the secret to eternal life, and everyone knows the fable of Ponce de Leon's search for the Fountain of Youth. But their efforts were in vain. In the end, the Grim Reaper claimed them all.

The closest we have come to stopping aging is preserving the body after death. The most noted example is Vladimir Lenin's body entombed in Russia's Red Square. When he died 90 years ago his blood and organs were removed and his body was infused with preservatives. Today he lies in an atmospheric controlled glass sarcophagus for tourists to gawk at.

Yet even under these ideal conditions his remains are deteriorating and his days as a celebrity corpse are numbered.

A better way to preserve the body is by cryonics. The body is placed in a steel cylinder and frozen rock hard. The hope is that when science discovers a cure for the cause of the deceased demise, he will be thawed out and revived. Who knows, it worked in Woody Allen's Sleeper.

However, cryo-preservation is a bit pricey. A deep freeze costs $250,000. For the penny-wise shopper there's the economy package that costs only $20,000. Here only the head is iced later to be stitched on to a suitably headless cadaver and revived for another shot at life, albeit a Frankensteinian one.

Yet there is hope for a less ghoulish and lots cheaper path to immortality. It was discovered by Dr. Mary Schweitzer in 1991.

Schweitzer found fresh, soft tissue in a 68 million-year-old T. rex fossil. Scientists were stunned. Yet there it was. Either the evolutionary dating system was light-years wide of the mark or something miraculous preserved the tissue.

Many believe Schweitzer found the miraculous. She prolonged tissue life two years by immersing it in iron-enriched blood, the same kind of iron found in all red blood cells and in all dinosaurs.

Immediately the press trumpeted this as The Answer to the timeless tissue. But they would have done better if they had cheered less and thought more. Two years is a little shy of 68 million years. It's like climbing a stepladder to get closer to the stars; it's a difference that makes no difference.

Since that time two fossils have been found that should send the iron theory to the scrap-metal yard. One is a 160 million-year-old octopus with an ink sac still in the liquid state. But octopi do not have red blood cells. Their blood is copper based, colored blue, and is devoid of iron.

The other fossil of interest was discovered by researchers at Ohio State University. They found intact tissue in a 350-million-year-old sea lily. These plant-like animals do not have blood, only seawater courses through these organisms. (Incidentally, this sea lily is exactly the same as its present-day descendants.)

There is yet another reason why these fossils may be absurdly misdated by evolutionists; it's the second law of thermodynamics.

This law states that all systems devolve, not evolve, from a high state of organization to a lower state. Hence, your once new car needs to be replaced, your house could use another coat of paint, and physically you're not the same person you were 20 years ago. (We won't consider the next 20 years.)

No matter what can be done or even imaged to be done to preserve tissue, it is doomed to failure. Why? All matter has heat, even if it's hundreds of degrees below zero it has some heat which is caused by molecular motion.

Molecules careen about like cars in a three-dimensional demolition derby crashing into one another causing molecular destruction---the second law of thermodynamics. Nothing can preserve tissue for thousands of years, let alone millions of years without this law exacting its deteriorating toll.

While new discoveries continue to be made, they are far from ho-hum. Recently the soft, fleshy crest on a dino's skull, similar to a rooster's comb, was unearthed.

When Mary Schweitzer first discovered unspoiled tissue in a dinosaur fossil 25 years ago she explained, “That's impossible!” Maybe she was right, unless the entire evolutionary dating system is wrong.

Sincerely,

Bob Scroggins

New Milford, PA

scroggins@epix.net