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Opinion

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Commentary

In the spring of 2010 I arrived home from work to find my street lined with small orange flags, the type of which usually indicate some sort of digging soon to take place. The flags were quite curious to me since Ryan Place had only been established a few years prior and our street seemed to have all the necessary infrastructure already in place. What could anyone be digging along the entire south side of the street and right in front of our three year old house? I reached out to a contact I had at the Fredonia DPW who told me that the flags were markers for the no parking signs to be ...

Large egos ultimately decide fate of world

Commentary

In August of 1945, President Harry S Truman made the momentous decision to go ahead with a plan to use nuclear bombs against Japan. It was a lose-lose situation, justified in the end simply by calculating the number of potential fatalities — how many people would die if we used it versus if we conducted a full invasion of Japan. Truman’s decision has been criticized and defended ever since, and recently re-examined in the film “Oppenheimer.” Truman grew up in a middle class, Presbyterian family in an agricultural environment in Missouri. His early adult life involved five years ...

Merger progress stays quiet, even after funding

The OBSERVER’s View

We are not against the recent action by the Chautauqua County Legislature to approve additional funding to the town of Pomfret for a study to investigate options for shared services and mergers. We do believe, however, that not enough is being said regarding where the effort stands. In July, lawmakers approved a resolution to award Pomfret $25,000 from the county's Government Reduction initiative for the initiative. The money is not part of the county's budget but rather will be coming from its reserve accounts. To his credit, Chautauqua County Executive PJ Wendel called upon the ...

U.S. seems paralyzed by ‘devastating chaos’

Commentary

Recently, the media has pinned the phrase “a failure of imagination” on Donald Trump’s presidency. That phrase applies to the actions (or inactions) of the Trump administration, but the real failure of imagination may lie with all of us who are subject to it. The phrase expresses the challenge of grappling with the question of “what if?”— gaming out the consequences of our actions and decisions. We make countless cause-and-effect calls on a daily basis, predicting outcomes based on past experiences and on our imaginative power to contemplate future scenarios. Initially, ...

Socialism, Welfare State not the same thing

Commentary

Many confuse the Welfare State with Socialism. Some confuse the Welfare State and Socialism with charity. Nobody is more confused about these definitions than the new generation of self-proclaimed Socialists. Charity involves voluntary assistance without expectation of repayment. Jesus admonished his followers (Matthew 6) to never announce their charity in public. This separates charity from the politics of “free stuff”. Charity might require reciprocation. Biblically, food was provided for the poor by leaving 10% of the crops unharvested in the fields where recipients could ...

Other voices: Democracy doesn't require truth police

Commentary

It became fashionable a few years ago for people to blame “misinformation” for others holding views they find wrongheaded. Social media platforms, sometimes jawboned by the federal government, invoked this supposed crisis to justify censorship, especially during the pandemic. This insulted the intelligence of the American people, who can make up their own minds without being told what to think. A new study explores how exposure to “misinformation” on social media affected voters in 2020. The answer, drawn from a three-month experiment on nearly 16,000 users, is very ...