Month: December 2020

The Lansingville Road Incident

I have frequently blogged about what has happened after the fact; but this blog is about something that hasn’t happened yet:

Traffic control on Lansingville Road.

These blogs will update readers on the effort being made to establish traffic management on this beleaguered rural road.

What is Lansingville Road?

It’s a 20ft wide north-south strip of asphalt with narrow gravel shoulders, sandwiched in between two New York State highways less than 4 miles apart.

Then why take Lansingville Road?

There is no traffic management whatsoever. The County’s policy of ignoring the rural community, and refusing to patrol or manage traffic on this road; means that drivers can drive however they want, at whatever speed they want. Even drivers with commercial licenses feel no need to follow the laws.

The mean speed on Lansingville Road has increased 5 mph in the last three years alone, and the 85th percentile is up to 62 mph; despite local and farm traffic traveling under 45 mph. In a 2019 speed volume check: vehicles were recorded at speeds of up to 90 mph.

Gravel trucks coming from the next county sometimes make hundreds of trips a day on Lansingville; roaring up and down the middle of the narrow roadway and further destroying its already cracking surface.

Last week I saw a Town dump truck and two cars passing a farm tractor with agricultural equipment, traveling as a single unit, across a double-yellow line into the opposite lane, and on a curve. And this is an everyday example of the reckless driving plaguing this once quiet and safe roadway.

My neighbor tells of how he used to walk the entire 1,600 foot length of his long driveway and not see one vehicle passing by on the road. Now, he has to wait for four or five cars and trucks just to have enough space to run across the road to his mailbox.

Why isn’t something being done?

The County Highway supervisor has twice stated [even in the face of photographic proof] that this truck traffic “was found to be Agriculture Trucks cutting the fields.”

An Ithaca-Tompkins County Transportation Council representative put the issue off with talk of petitions and documentation; but ended by stating that their final decisions were made of the basis of the “greater good.”

Will the County’s concern for the safety and welfare of the rural community ever rise above the convenience and profit of the Collegiate Corporations and their cronies?

No.

I will blog as events unfold.

All this morning, every 15 or 20 minutes, a cement mixer thundered by. [Probably carrying cuttings from the fields.]

More blogs than you can shake a fist at

After making another folder, and saving yet another partially written blog; I’ve decided to make a State of the Blogs Address. As they say in the Deli: “Many are chilled, but few are frozen.” So here is a mixed list of the works that are cluttering my “can’t go the pub” life:

The Lansingville Road Incident – I have frequently blogged about what has happened after the fact; but this blog is about something that hasn’t happened yet: Traffic control on Lansingville Road.

Will Cornithaca County’s doctrine elite place the safety and welfare of the rural community above their own convenience and profit? Not on your crony!

Here are some more of the blogs in process:

Divide and Conquer, For ALL Lansing, Full Disclosure – Full Exposure, Lies and Lubyanka, May the Source be with You, Meaningful Political Participation, Melting Pot Myth, Old and In The Way, Principles vs Arguments, Put on a Different Face, Reasonless Reasoning, Rural Social Justice, Sauce for the Goose, StoneWindowing, The Bigotry Survey, Turned on its Axis, What’s Causing It?

And as promised: Black Box Bureaucracy.

I have recently updated two websites:

The Idea Enhancement Project – exploring the use of visual imagery to promote innovative and creative thought.

Doug Baird Art – representative artworks.

At Christmastime; when the only thing hanging over your head should be mistletoe, and the only thing under your head should be beer — it’s time to have a pint and a kiss, and get back to work. [Did I put them in that order?]

As a poet, I have a confession

I embrace every case for depression

I can sit on my ass

With a great gravitas

And get drunk with a thoughtful expression.

Handyland

Affirmative Action is most notable, not for its part ending discriminatory practices; but as the wedge that opened the door to the wholesale countenancing of discriminatory practices.

By the New Millennium; there was no meaningful participation left for the people in the formulation of government policy, and no protections against the tyranny of the “greater good.”

In Cornithaca County, the “greater good” is not a decision that is reasoned, or that is voted on, or even answerable — it’s an edict; a proclamation; a caricature of benevolence; an indifferently disguised cronyism that fools no one; emanating from an authority that is too powerful and too much in control to care.

And in the County’s heavily stratified society; you need to step on those below you to keep your place [and keep them in theirs.]

Handyland

Just as nothing so undercuts the pretensions of the elite as the poverty of those at the bottom; nothing shows the “greater good” in a truer light than its policies in the Cornithaca County’s marginalized rural community.

When Cornell’s expanding bedroom community took over Lansing’s government; they lock-stepped with the “County’s” plan to build thousands of units of housing and create an urban “node” in this once rural town.

New zoning [with a Form Based Code agenda] was pushed through, with “Complete Streets” and a “Town Center” creating a suburban pastiche of cozy cul-de-sacs; but there was a problem: by law, they couldn’t exclude “sexually-oriented businesses.”

The solution: Dump it on the rural people.

APPENDIX II: ADULT ENTERTAINMENT ORDINANCE

1) INTENT

It is the intent of this local law to regulate sexually-oriented businesses, to promote the health, safety, morals and general welfare of the citizens of the Town of Lansing and to establish reasonable and uniform regulations to monitor the location and concentration of sexually oriented businesses within the town of Lansing.

USES PERMITTED – RESTRICTIONS

Sexually-oriented business, as defined herein, shall be permitted in a Rural Agricultural district only

If you lived on an isolated rural road, with no Sheriff’s patrols and no street lights, and your nearest neighbor was a 24-hour “Adult” bookstore: how would you feel about the “health, safety, morals and general welfare” of your family?

This is how the Greater Good is worked in Cornithaca County.

Extracting Righteousness

The COVID-19 epidemic was disastrous to the elderly world-wide, but in Tompkins County; it wasn’t even a story.

Every nursing home in New York State is thoroughly inspected every year, down to the “Percent of long stay low risk residents who lose control of their bowel or bladder.” The conditions and resources New York’s nursing homes was well documented and understood by authorities; and they did nothing to avert the massive death toll – but that wasn’t a story.

What was the media view?

Old people are going to die, it’s only natural, they’ve lived a long time [and they’re a burden] and look; see how many have died from other causes . . . so let’s do a potboiler, throw in some other pandemics and recast the issue as one of historic inevitability.

The overwhelming statistical correlation of COVID-19 deaths with age was widely viewed without compassion, or even much interest, but after some judicious racial filtering, and a little massaging of numbers; a one-dimensional race-based story became the defining media take-away.

You can prove anything statistically; provided your viewpoint is narrow enough.

Statistics are increasingly the “tool of choice” for institutions and special interests seeking to mold opinion and validate their self-serving agendas.

Policy and public information is skewed by selective reporting, while at the same time; these frequently cited studies have reached a crisis level of fraudulent data and unreplicable results.

With the “don’t throw the bias out with the bath water” attitude of authorities, and a non-thinking population desperately seeking the comfort zone of entitlement; there could be a few clouds in our future.

Or in a new-school remix: “Don’t fix the problem, fix the blame.”