The Hayseeds blog, No. 118 for the week starting June 12, 2005.
May 29, 2005
Hayseeds No. 117
June 12, 2005
Hayseeds No. 118
June 19, 2005
Hayseeds No. 118
Visit the Hayseeds Index
to see all previous entries.
It looks like crime stats are down for the 11th year in a row. Pataki is probably already claiming that it's all his fault. We have to wonder now that crime is down by about 5% statewide, if we can just cut district attorney and police agency budgets by about that amount and use it for property tax cuts—our farmer friends would like that. Operation IMPACT is sometimes also credited for the cut, except that it didn't really start anywhere but Rochester before last October, so it's IMPACT was minimal.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that states don't have the right to create laws contradictory to federal laws, and as such can't make medical marijuna legal in their states without running amok of federal law. Sounds reasonable with the terms of the 14th admendment, but it also is sad byproduct of the overreach of federal government. The feds should only be legislating things that apply to multiple states, and the idea of medical marijuna trafficking across states is absurd.
Some people are rather unhappy about the noise that these machines make and it's dividing this community between riders and people who want some peace and quiet from these sometimes rather noisey machines. Ultimately the solution is about being tolerant and finding compromise:
Tony Tanzosh, wants to ride his ATVs: "I work hard, and I'd much rather have my son doing this, supervised, than something else. It's not like we're these evil hillbillies who just ride and ride," Tanzosh said. "I can be tolerant to (Murnion), but he needs to be tolerant, too."
Part of the problem is caused by the changing demographics of that area: The ATV spat is indicative of the changing landscape not just in Warwick but in the rest of the Hudson Valley and Catskills. As this once rural region increasingly becomes more suburban, the gap between people's lives is narrowing. No longer are there acres between neighbors.
I hope these people talk, and the fun of rural life is protected, while residential development can happen in compact and otherwise smart ways.
The big stadium that might have left upstate taxpayers holding the bag, is offically dead according to Sheldon Silver, whose vote was neccessary to allow the NY Sports Authority to borrow the neccessary amount of money to pay for the stadium.
Shelly's rational was simple: if your ignoring the WTC in his district, he certainly wasn't going to support a competing stadium outside of his district. Likewise, with Joe wanting money for his district of a similar preportion, and NYS taxpayers milked dry, it was almost dead from the start.
Mr. Silver said that even if New York is awarded the 2012 Olympic Games, he would not support a West Side stadium project.
Mr. Silver said rebuilding Lower Manhattan was a "moral" issue and dismissed the stadium plan as simple "ambition."
"The mayor and the governor have had almost four years to establish a construction schedule for Lower Manhattan," he said.
Labor people and those who would have worked on these projects are probably understandably upset. Let's hope that the new WTC site will provide jobs for these people, along with the planned renovation of the Jacob Javits Center—all at a lower cost to the state of New York.
At least that's the message he is sending to poor people with his recalculating of financial aid forumlas that will mean that many will lose a lot of aid. For me, that amount will be nearly $5,000 dollars a year, although some of that loss is do to my higher income.
Goverment should do all it can to encourage people who want to go to college to be there. On the other hand, Metroland points out that too many people are going to college for all the wrong reasons. College should not be denied to people based on finacial ability or even their ability to learn, but should be open to all that want to go there. Some people will have it harder then others, but let's hope that government will act to equal out the playing field.
Let's also remember college is not all about studying liberal arts. There are many fine trade schools out there, along with things like engineering schools that might be expensive but are much more pratical then the generic liberal arts education. I am a political scientist myself, but certainly that is my choice. I don't claim to have any special abilities from my studies, but it has allowed me to think in new and creative ways. See also this story in Metroland about struggling farmers and how education beyond the farm helped them (other aspects of this story will be discussed later this week on this blog). People should be encouraged to do whatever they want.
This month of course is Dairy Month across the country. It's a time we get to celebrate those big and beautiful black and white animals, along with their light tan counterparts, and whatever other color dairy cows out there. Get to the LOB around noon-time today, and stock on up with dairy products—and bring a baggy to carry them on out. Lots of stuff on all the tables.
From the view of the Twin Towers, it is very clear with the Heldebergs standing out in stark contrast to the light blue summer sky, and the urban rot nearby. Instead of taking the bus, I walked from my pickup about 5 blocks away on Western Ave to where I work. That was good excerise in such a beautiful day, a buck less, and almost faster then taking the pokey regular Route 12 city bus for 5 blocks. That and I'm a spoiled brat from using the Elm Avenue Park and Ride with the express Route 19.
Don't worry kids though, I'm not on that much of a diet—though I'm trying to be more healthy and am avoiding the South Mall Diet. I still have lots of left-overs filling the fridge here at Higher Ed Corp as I took a lot from Dairy Day. I simply would not have drank that ultra-chocate milk that I later found out had 500 calories for a tiny bottle. So much more milk being healthy. Milk and beer can really add pounds, despite being awsome beverages.
The nice people over at PEF and CSEA, organized labor of many state workers is out there protesting the abuse of contractors and temps in state agencies. All I can do is shake my head up and down and say, yeap. It's bad when we are paying a contractor $20/hour when the state could be doing in house for about half as much—and the worker would get better pay and benefits for the same price. From Avaya administering CAPnet to a hiring freeze that is so slushy with temps that it's non-existant, it's a story of fraud and wasted state money.
How else can one explain the biggest state budget in the whole United States (NYS unadjusted for inflation is spending more then the whole federal budget in 1967). $106 billion seems like a lot, when our rural neighboor to the east, Vermont is spending only $1 billion a year. Vermont's population is not 1/106 of New York's population. If NYS spent per capita what Vermont spent, government would only cost around $26 billion dollars!
Conclusions. Let's be honest about government, and pass the accountability bills that the unions want. We need more state workers, with all of the benefits they get at a lower cost to taxpayers. It's simply not fair to leave so many people out on the learch, when the state should be setting a leadership model for all to follow.
It was a PEF ralley yesterday. Sorry for my mistake. Second, I'm thinking that we really could expand this privitization idea to improve the efficency of government. For one, we could get a 'competant' administrator from a private recruitment agency to be our governor. Good alternative to Pataki.
Then there is the legislature, which needs to be privatized immediately. Passing only 6% of all the bills they recieve every year would suggest that a private alternative would be more efficent. And if we are looking for ways to cut further fat from the legislature we could just ban Republicans from the Assembly and Democrats from the Senate. Privitized judges and jails could avoid all those pesky civil liberties protections.
See, we don't really need government. We need more contractors.
Well maybe for their older brothers with the lawforkids.org that attempts to scare kids from doing any of those, well duh, dumb things. I don't think anybody's going to read the penal law before stealing a car, especially not kids. A dumbed down version might add some clarity to the law, but it makes much more sense to tell people just to use common sense, and throw some references in law.
I wish the road signs and the alike would give you the V&T law that gives them force. We should be encouraging people to understand the law and to question it. The Bar Assocation that puts together that website says they're going to add a section to allow kids to contact their legislators, but don't hold your breath. I think we should be teaching kids to challenge authority, not to blindly obeying it. Most importantly though, kids simly won't go to that site as it's way too boring.
It was interesting to see a mention in passing about the construction worker that was killed on I-90 last year in the Times Union paper on the article about them closing I-90 down at night for paving. It's good to see that safety standards have been improved, but we would hope that they'd do more, such as naming a post office after him, and creating a Construction Worker memorial down at the Empire Plaza, ala what they did for Lt. John Finn. Ballard wasn't an angry, hateful person unlike too many of those in the public safety industry.
I've been thinking a lot about contacting and maybe petitioning my representives to submit a bill to the legislature that would create such a memorial to fallen construction workers. After all the ESP placard says it best—"The men and women in the construction industry not only built buildings, they also built character". That quote is so Nelson Rockefeller sounding. Everybody loves construction workers, like everybody loves farmers.
We are always hearing about school shootings, but we never hear about true tragities like Keith Nuebauer out in Pheonia (a few miles north of Syracuse on I-86). He was killed when his 1984 Ford Farmall tractor rolled over on the drive to tractor day at his high school, when he was cut off by an ATV on the highway.
It's too bad that my old High School never had anything like that. Then again, it wasn't as much of a farming community as some of the more rural towns around in upstate New York. Yet, I do seem to remember how the ever so large ag department was proud of their big air-conditioned Kabota tractor (not even my pickup truck has air conditioning ;), and how it could drive over the curb without any problems.
It looks like the the Times Union and others in the community think there is wisdom in creating a even more divided unified court system (an oxymoron). Our founding fathers where wrong in creating two systems of justice: tort and criminal, and over the years it has gotten worst. We tried to reform the court system by unifying courts by having the same judges trying civil and criminal matters, but that didn't fix the problem of there being two systems of justice. It's even worst that the civil courts are abused by government for it's matters (suing polluters), and criminal courts are used for personal disputes (he damaged my car, so it must be automatically vandalism).
The criminal courts are being fragmented even further, and in many cases specialized courts with special locations and special judges are breaking the unified court system even further. We have family court judges, elected totally seperate from the County Supreme Court justices, and have their own building and rules. Many cities are getting drug courts, and mental health courts are next down the pike. The intent to have judges that have a special understanding of their material. Yet unlike drug offenses or youthful offenses, there is no clear defination of who should go to mental health courts and who should go to regular criminal courts.
I tend to believe that anybody knowingly violating a law in a democracy is mentally ill. After all, laws where created by a delibrative process that sets the norms of a society. Lawmakers defines what is sanity. Natural laws and the Bible give our leaders great insight at what is needed for a well-ordered society, but these concepts do not define sanity. We can say that insanity is when people act strangely and in a pathological fashion, until you remember some of the horrors of R.D. Laing's normal man who has killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
He obviously is referring to the horrors of Vietnam, Korea, and the World Wars.
My thought is that all criminal courts should be abandoned for a unified and strong tort system. If somebody does not like the behavior of another individual, then sue them. Police could sue people for speeding, as they are posing a risk to them and the people of the state. There should be fines plus legal fees accessed. This would go a long way towards making justice self-supporting unlike the current criminal justice system which eats state and local budgets. At the same time, we need to focus on the behavioral aspects of individual who choose to speed on the highway. As part of a settlement for a speeding ticket, it would be required for individuals to take a course like defensive driving or get counseling to figure out solutions not to be speed (like leaving for worke earlier) or dealing with the aggression that encourages speeding.
Such a system deals effectively with the mentally ill, as instead of dragging them through a lengthy court process, it makes the perpetuator pay for the cost of justice and get help. For more serious crimes, where an individual might hurt another one again, we need a strong use of the Article 43 law that allows for inpatient containment of the mentally ill and immediately violent people. Kendra's law is another strong alternative for those who commit violent acts to others, and we have strong drugs and treatment to control people effectively. Murders and rapists need treatment, they don't need punishment. It doesn't matter if their Jersey Cows are telling them to kill their wife (with all applogizes to Bob Dylan), or if they are angry at their wives for dating the construction wroker down the street. The problem is the action of killing their wife, and that needs to be treated.
Resitution needs to made to person's family who was killed. If a person has a million dollar judgement accessed against them for killing, they will be punished at the same time that they are paying back their debt to the people immediately effected. We aren't all effected directly by a man killing his wife, but certainly his family. Our criminal system normally collects very little or no resitutions, or ends up hurting the victim more by forcing them to pay high taxes to lock up people.
There are some problems with this idea. For one, victims without family or whose family is improverished are unlikely to hire a lawyer. Poverty does not mean a life is unimportant. We need to give some of the money currently going in the pockets of DAs to allow private citizens to create torts against their victimizers. Police also need greater tort powers and money, so they can hire lawyers to go after such lawless people. Some people would be bothered by an approach that appears light on crime. Others don't want to see their victimizers back on the street, abit under the control of psychoactive chemicals and behavioral retraining.
There are many other benifits with this idea. The standard of a preponderance of evidence means we can procecute people without the level otherwise required. We aren't spending all this money on prisons, when people can be treated quicker in an intensive impatient basis with psychoactive chemicals, and subsiquently released under an outpatient basis. Frivolous procecutions are reduced, as they are expensive and would not recoup any of the procecutorial costs. Right now, if a DA screws up there is only a very small wrongful conviction fund to give resitution to the wrongly procecuted person.
Conclusions. We need not to focus on treatment and resitution in court proceedings, and not on punishment. Effective behavioral treatment does not involve feelings or motives, instead it involves preventing further behavior that can hurt other individuals. When we start to get our anger out of our courts, and instead looking for solutions to behavioral problems, we can focus on a brighter tommorow. No, I don't think anything of this will ever happen, but it does suggest many ideas for reforming the existing court system.
The Cohoes falls used to be pretty spectualar, until much of the water was deverted to the hydroplant to create about 38.8 megawatts of energy, and the decrepit projects in that area made the area an ugly mess. The proposals to replace the hydroplant with a prettier and more environmentally friendly plant have been delayed for a long time, and Metroland has a nice feature on what's going on up there.
And a bill of $3 million dollars, thanks to some heavy T-storms that left a lot of rain everywhere, and made the county known for more deer then democrats with a real mess to clean up.
We could use some of that rain down here in Albany, though we did get a little last night. Nice warm sunny weather is good for the corn and other crops, but they also need rain. Before you know it, dairy farmers will be complaining again about the weather!
