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Peoples column

Form county panel now

Editor, OBSERVER: The League of Women Voters of Chautauqua County strongly urges the County Legislature to prepare for redistricting now. Now is the time to focus on the creation of an exploratory bipartisan work group to lay the groundwork for the bipartisan redistricting committee or commission as required by our county’s charter. According to Section 2.01 of the county charter, once the official committee or commission is appointed, its members have only three months to study the population data and make recommendations in the form of a local law to the Legislature. This ...

State must help disabled

Editor, OBSERVER: It’s a shame that the state of New York doesn’t want to subsidize nonprofit agencies that service disabled children and adults and their families. Families with disabled children and adults can’t get all the help and services they need from the non-profit agencies due to a lack of funding from the state of New York. The agencies can’t afford to pay their support staff a livable wage with benefits because the state is too cheap to subsidize agencies. The individuals who benefit from these agencies depend on the services and their support staff to help ...

People’s column

Climate events before our eyes Editor, OBSERVER: I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the letter published July 3. The writer says that efforts to hold back climate change are “self-serving and presumptive.” How can anyone honestly and with a straight face suggest that we mustn’t be doing everything we possibly can to put the brakes on climate change with all our might? Hundreds of people died this past week in the Pacific Northwest because of climate change related heat. Farmers in California are triaging crops for the drought. Sea level rise is wreaking havoc in ...

People’s column

Contact reps over turbines Editor, OBSERVER, The threat of wind turbines in Lake Erie increases as a few dozen politicians in Albany and downstate impose their self-serving and presumptive efforts to halt the world’s changing climate. Science illustrates both sides of our industrial activities which simultaneously create the problem and attempt to solve it. The proposed Lake Erie turbines are the manufacturing lobbyists’ way of saying, “We can use the Lake like we did in 1900 and save it at the same time.”. Those who see this project as illogical and dishonest can support ...

Columnist has refrain that’s heard before

Editor, OBSERVER: Richard Westlund in his column, “The elusive truth” (June 21) laments: “Our main purpose in education seems to train people to function in society, and how to earn a living. In education circles we have very little to say about how to live that living. We may get into philosophy and psychology later in college, but by that time we are pretty well set in our appraisals of reality.” Certain secondary school students have read Cicero’s Orations and Virgil’s Aeneid in their third and fourth years of their Latin major. I submit that these efforts address ...

People’s column

Another step toward socialism EDITOR, OBSERVER An economics professor did an experiment in his class of students who insisted that socialism worked. He averages all the grades on their next test. No one fails, no one received an A. After the first test, everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset. The students who studied little were happy. After the second test, the students who studied little studied even less. The students who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too, so they studied little. The second test average was a D. No one was happy. ...