A day later, or is it just a day late? Does it matter anymore? If you were intending to run for the Board of Health, it does if you wanted in on the ballot. Deadline was yesterday. No, I don't know who actually took out papers, if anyone, besides DeTerra and Wethington.
Anyway, some simple reminders on a few things, which I have promised to myself and I think stated to you that I would stop giving, but ...
Comment all you want but stay on topic. You want to respond to other comments, fine, as long as you stay on topic. On a rare occasion or two, I have declared an "open line" format. When I do that, I realize what it means, and the potential of the extra moderation work.
I am not however going to moderate comments that are a chain of tit for tat or moderate a debate between commentators which strays off course.
I shut the comments off on a post last night because of three comments received within a short period which strayed too far in my mind and which were only going to lead to a discussion even further off line.
Unfortunately again a comment about one line zingers. Rarely, if ever, will the same be posted. Even ones I tend to agree with. Want to throw a good zinger, work it into a relevant comment. Otherwise open up a Facebook account or find one of the numerous other alternatives out there for you to take a shot.
Enough on this. Going forward, and I mean it this time, no further explanations on why comments get posted or not.
Someone once said to the effect that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they aren't entitled to their own set of facts. Seems to me it might also be appropriate to add no one should be entitled to ignore all the facts either.
Still everyone is entitled to an opinion. But that leads me to paraphrasing another old saying, just be cause you have a right to one, doesn't mean expressing it is always the right thing to do.
Trust me, I find myself tempering my opinions more and more, especially on this blog. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, I don't know.
What I do know is there is a continuing polarization going on. The drift away from any reasonable position seems to have slowed somewhat, but I am not sure whether that is a result of people beginning to "warm up" to the idea of compromise, or a result of having drifted so far apart the extreme ends have been reached.
We spin our wheels arguing pros and cons. Until a decisions gets made we are all the rats on that wheel in a cage. We talk about what ifs, maybe could be, and we argue about facts from both sides that aren't always facts.
We are locked into a process where as a community the decisions are in the hands of our elected officials. Quite frankly, if the decisions that have been made to date are in those officials' opinions the correct ones, you have to wonder just what is going on.
That's it for today. Again quite frankly, I have spent the better part of an hour and a half spinning my own wheels about the pros and cons of certain opinions to offer. I am out of time now, and my mind is still in its own log jam today.
Be safe.
Staying on target with BOH race and documentation:
ReplyDeleteHere comes months of the Board of Health campaign. A campaign that will quickly gain national attention not just because of Fairhaven but what is going on at the state level.
The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has already had a least one panel meeting with independent acousticians to start new wind turbine noise standards. While the BOH race is going on noise standards of wind turbines will be changing and there is no doubt they will change.
The issue for the Boards of Health and the state is megawatt turbines like Fairhaven, Falmouth, Kingston and Scituate.
The bottom line is the noise issue is not going to go away even if there is a compromise.
Documentation of yesterdays meeting at DEP : http://www.mass.gov/eea/agencies/massdep/news/advisory-committees/wntag.html
If the state is just beginning hearings, surely you don't think it wil have any effect on the boh races for the next two years...Of course, to you, the mere fact there was a meeting in boston is absolute evidence the fairhaven turbines are coming down, which of course is not true.
ReplyDeleteRhetorically speaking, what does that panel do for our problem? There certainly may be prospectively applied regulations. Indeed if the state somehow comes up with a retroactive standard that would certainly solve the problem. Such retroactive standards are very far and few between however.
ReplyDeleteI agree, the noise isn't going away with a compromise. If there is a compromise, absent the miracle of an ex post facto standard, there may still be a battle, but I think one side will have definitely lost the war at that point.