State fiddles while Lake George chokes

Invasive species are becoming a significant threat to the water quality of Lake George. There are fears that further expansion of the Asian clam population will cause algae blooms that will menace the quality of drinking water that lake communities rely on and render beaches unfit for swimming, menacing the tourism that lake communities rely on. 
  
Regional organizations Lake George Association and Fund for Lake George have recognized this serious threat but the state Department of Environmental Conservation has been accused of not spending the money and attention that the issue deserves. The LGA recently proposed the mandatory washing of all boats entering the lake but DEC put the brakes on that idea, it would study the idea when they bothered to get around to it. They added that no such plan could not be implemented in 2013. Yet, there is no indication that DEC has the intention of implementing ANY serious plan in 2013. Disgusted, the town of Bolton is trying to implement its own boat washing plan.

The Post-Star recently published an interview with DEC chief Joe Martens. In it, he said that the state would not shift any money from the part of the Environmental Protection Fund dedicated to land purchases to the underfunded invasive species program. This despite the fact that the EPF's stated purpose is not solely to buy land but also to 'develop and preserve these resources.'

In other words, the state wants to buy more land but is unwilling or unable to properly take care of the land (and water) it already owns. 

I know the DEC is being gutted by the budget process and is under serious pressure by Emperor Andrew's regime to mindlessly rubber stamp hydrofracking in the state's Southern Tier. But the agency should focus first on properly preserving the land and water they're already responsible for before adding more.

I have no ideological objection to the state owning land (provided they actually pay local property taxes on it as legally required), but this is a suicidal approach. Their name is not the Department of State Land Acquisition. It's the Department of *Environmental Conservation*. Protecting the ecology is their most important job. Buying more land is secondary.

Guns, property and voting

The controversial New York gun law passed recently contained a provision whereby gun registration information (such as addresses of registrants) would cease to be accessible to the general public. This came after the contemptible publication of gun owners’ addresses by a newspaper in the downstate’s Hudson Valley.

But my question is this. You are required to register with the government if you wish to exercise these three constitutional rights: gun ownership, voting and property ownership. But while the addresses of voters and property owners are considered public domain, available for any Tom, Dick and Harry to publish on the Internet (or for any stalker to target their victim), the addresses of gun owners, at least in New York state, are now private.

I’ve asked this question of many people but I’ve still never gotten an answer: why is the privacy of registrants’ information treated differently for gun owners than it is for voters and property owners?

 

Please note: This entry is NOT intended to debate whether one should have to register to exercise any of these rights. It’s acknowledging the fact that one has to and wondering why the personal information is subsequently treated differently depending on the right being exercised. Any comments that focus on whether one should have to register for any of these will be rejected so as not to hijack the intent of the discussion.

Careless development worsened impact of Hurricane Sandy

While the false dichotomy narrative pretends that environmental concern and development are antithetical, a public radio report reminds us otherwise. WNYC ran a good report exploring how overdevelopment and careless, thoughtless development significantly exacerbated the impact on New Jersey of Hurricane Sandy.

Are anti-AIDS programs based on a false premise?

"When I give food to the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I'm called a communist." -Archbishop Dom Helder Camara. This essay is part of an occasional feature on this blog that presents compelling stories from elsewhere in the world, particularly Africa, that are little reported in the American media. It's part of my campaign to get people to realize there is a lot going on in the world outside the US, IsraelStine and the Trumped Up Enemy of the Month. A list of all pieces in this series can be found found here..

The public radio show This American life has a fascinating story on how counterintuitive behavior sometimes save lives and how many AIDS prevention programs in Africa are based on flawed conventional wisdom.

(Click here to access theshow... see Act One)

Fetuses aren't people, says Catholic group

In order to beat a malpractice suit, a Catholic hospital in Colorado made the astonishing (for them) contention that a fetus is not a person.

Raw Story reports: According to the Colorado Independent, in the death of a 31-year-old woman carrying twin fetuses, Catholic Health Initiatives’ attorneys argued that in cases of wrongful death, the term “person” only applies to individuals born alive, and not to those who die in utero.

Oops!

The era before 'job killing regulations'

I'm currently reading the fascinating book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. I can  not recommend it highly enough.

A passage describes working conditions in the garment factories of New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It was incredibly hard and often miserable labor. The conditions were inhuman. One survey in the 1890s put the average workweek at eighty-four hours, which comes totwelve hours a day. At times, it was higher. “During the busy season,” David Von Drehle writes in Triangle: The Fire That Changed Amierca, “it was not unusual to find workers on stools or broken chairs, bent over their sewing or hot irons, from 5 a.m"

Boy, I really long for the good old days before 'big government' imposed 'job killing regulations.' Sounds like a real paradise lost.

Trying to understand the gun culture

Note: this essay is about the gun culture, not about gun control legislation or proposals.

NCPR’s In Box blog has an interesting essay on northern New York’s cowboy culture.

I grew up in upstate New York and have spent virtually my whole life here. I’ve seen enough of isolated rural New York that I understand perfectly well why someone might feel the need to own a gun to protect their family and home. But while I get most of the gun culture, even if I don’t partake in it, there are still aspects about it that I simply don’t get.

An acquaintance of mine last week brought up the issue of guns last week following the passing of a gun control measure by the New York legislature and governor, the first since the Sandy Hook massacre. This was a bit surprising since we’d never directly talked politics before. He’s an evangelical Christian and very socially conservative (at least based on his Facebook page). He was extremely upset by the law. Fair enough.

He was so agitated that he was speculating on the possibility of moving to Canada or to Vermont... not mere ranting since he lives a stone’s throw away from the latter.

To him, the key issue seemed to be the mere (to my eyes) fact of having to register his weapons. when he asked if guns had to be registered in Canada and I said I think they did, he said the heck with that.

He seems like a nice reasonable person. Not a bloodthirsty fanatic. Not a drone intoning from a script. Not a raving lunatic blaming video games for Newtown. He is religious, pleasant, even boring, family man.

But the gun issue was so important to him, it seemed to trump his other views... to the point that as an evangelical social conservative, he’d considered moving to a far more secular country than ours and to a state where gay marriage was legal (and probably the most liberal state in the nation overall).

Evangelicalism seemed to be at the core of himself and his family’s everything, yet when guns were threatened, it seemed to trump even something as strong as religious belief. *This* is what I don’t get about gun culture... and frankly what unnerves me a bit.

Dr. King's real dream: dignity for all

Below is my annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day essay. Those who turn Dr. King into some sort of saccharine saint, as being solely about government equality under law for all skin colors, trivialize his struggle. He was about that, but about much more than that. His struggle was about the dignity of human beings, in the broadest sense. This New York Times essay says it best: Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial.

***

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy against segregation and other forms of state-sponsored racism. On this national holiday honoring him, it's worth remembering that King viewed as more than mere legal racial equality. He viewed the struggle more broadly as one in favor of human dignity. This is why he did not retire from public life following legalistic victories such as Brown vs the Board of Education or the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Although legal segregation was crumbling in the last years of his life, Dr. King did not diminish his activism in any way. He merely refocused it toward another aspect of human dignity.

At the time of his assassination in 1968, King was in Memphis as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SLCC) Poor People's Campaign, where the city's garbage workers were protesting against unlivable wages. The SLCC had conceived the campaign as a way to mobilize poor people of all skin colors on behalf of a federal economic plan to rebuild American cities.

King realized that the end of state-imposed segregation would not improve the lives of black people if they remained miserably poor. In much the same way the lives of blacks in the south remained virtually unchanged long after the 'transition' from slavery to sharecropping.

King viewed the campaign part as the second phase of the civil rights' struggle. He viewed endemic poverty as a civil rights' issue.

This commitment to human dignity animated another lesser known aspect of King's work: his opposition to the Vietnam War and to militarism more broadly.

During his Beyond Vietnam speech given exactly one year before his murder, he explained why opposition to the aggression against Vietnam had entered into his activism:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men [in the ghettos of the north], I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Americans were being shipped off to Vietnam to kill, to destroy and to die. Nothing good was happening because of this. And King knew that the war machine specifically sought those with few other economic options to serve as its cannon fodder, a situation that's little different today.

Like many social justice advocates before and since, he deplored how much of our national resources (both financial and human) was wasted on fabricating foreign enemies to obliterate. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom," he warned.

King probably realized that the fact that many young people had few other economic options was no accident, but the result of conscious policy choices made to ensure an insatiable monster created, funded and propped up by your tax dollars always had food.

(It's not the only insatiable monster but the other main one merits an entry of its own)

To restrict Dr. King's legacy to the fight for legal equality for black people is to sell him short. And it's misleads people into believing that his dream has been realized. His true struggle was the quest for human dignity for all people.

He could be no clearer about this when he concluded his Beyond Vietnam speech:

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

If you truly want to honor him, then follow this injunction.