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Hey Tony:
I read your letter in the paper. This zoning is simply a power
grab through laws that are so vague that they
can be anything. That is liberalism for you. The town board is
concerned about everything from anearthworm to the kind of window
you have on your house.
Meanwhile they neglect their duty just like the federal
government.
The purpose of local government is to provide for the general
welfare, not welfare checks. That meansthat roads, their
maintenance, police protection emergency services etc are the
responsibility of your local
government. I noticed that a fire this Christmas eve destroyed a
very expansive home in town. I happened
to be in town and noticed that no water comes out of the fire
hydrants. That house had one in front of it. Iguess they are
pissoirs for male dogs.
If I was the under-writer for that house, I would sue every
member of the town-board and the voters for
restitution.The department of no buildings is also culpable as
well as the architect for allowing such a firetrap to be
approved and built. The purpose of a building code is safety.
Bad taste does not kill people. In earthquake
zones that is pretty important. It appears to me that the sole
purpose of the Cold Spring town government
is to insure that no poor people or business ever get the notion
of ever desiring to live here. That is apretty tough item to sell
from lefties who pretend to strive for a classless society. We have
a new
phenomenon in America. Socialism for the rich.
The so called planning board should focus on providing fire
protection not what dumb liberals think yourwindows should look
like. To that effect I would decide the following:
provide a new 16 inch fire-main from the reservoir with a bypass
around the filtration plant to be
opened as required.
Connect a main from the Hudson River with a set of diesel
fire-pumps or generators-pumps with
the capability of emergency fire service as well as to replenish
the reservoir in a drought.
Install strategically located super hydrants and purchase a hose
truck specifically designed to payout hose where needed. Train
volunteers for hose company duties.
For looks and as a means of keeping the main clear, install a
pretty fountain at the Hudson
landing. This will serve also to indicate if the main has
pressure. It would be nice to be able to cross connect the fire
main with the existing system with firetruck
super pumpers but the danger of rupturing the existing mains or
the lack of regulators in private
homes make this choice unattainable.Large private homes should
be required to conform to the same standards as large commercial
buildings
with respect to fire containment and or protection in town
areas.
Sprinklers for a certain size residence. Today sprinklers are
available in high temp PVC. The
town-board should encourage not force people to consider that
for any home. Sprinklers shouldbe wet pipe only.
In places where the residence is not heated, dry pipe systems
may be permissible.
Provide for means of connection to existing fire department
apparatus.
Automatic fire doors should separate areas of large buildings
and have the capabilities ofautomatic operation.
Combustible materials on wall areas that exceed twenty percent
should be treated and or appliedto type x drywall fully taped as
well as the remaining area. Ceilings in multistory dwellings or
high headroom should be covered by two layers of type x
drywall.
The requirement above may be waived if all walls are devoid of
air space through theinstallation of pressurized fire retardant
insulation.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could get these scummy libs to worry
about that so they would leave us alone. I
understand from my private sources that the hydrants in town
deliver about fifty gallons pr minute
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behind the pumper which would make every sprinkler system in
town ineffective in a large calamity.
Walmart's fire-pumps deliver five thousand gallons per minute
with or without utility power. As an added
benefit, the cash register and lights also stay on during
outages. I was completely shocked to see our fire
personnel using kiddie pools to put out that fire and collecting
water from the Hudson river for thatbeautiful new firetrap. Check
out the following article from Tom Sowell.
Joe Altmann
[email protected]
Thomas Sowell
The left's vocabulary
A recent angry e-mail from a reader said that certain issues
should not be determined by "the dictates of
the market." With a mere turn of a phrase, he had turned reality
upside down.
Decisions by people free to make their mutual accommodations
with other free people were called
"dictates" while having third parties tell all of them what they
could and couldn't do was not.
Verbal coups have long been a specialty of the left.
Totalitarian countries on the left have calledthemselves "people's
democracies" and used the egalitarian greeting "comrade" even
though some
comrades had the arbitrary power of life and death over other
comrades.
In democratic countries, where public opinion matters, the left
has used its verbal talents to change the
whole meaning of words and to substitute new words, so that
issues would be debated in terms of their
redefined vocabulary, instead of the real substance of the
issues.
Words which have acquired connotations from the actual
experiences of millions of human beings over
generations, or even centuries, have been replaced by new words
that wipe out those connotations and
substitute more fashionable notions of the left.
The word "swamp," for example, has been all but erased from the
language. Swamps were messy,
sometimes smelly, places where mosquitoes bred and sometimes
snakes lurked. The left has replaced theword "swamp" with
"wetlands," a word spoken in pious tones usually reserved for
sacred things.
The point of this verbal sleight-of-hand is to impose the left's
notions of how other people can use their
own land. Restrictive laws about "wetlands" have imposed huge
costs on farmers and other owners ofland that happened to have a
certain amount of water on it.
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]
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Another word that the left has virtually banished from the
language is "bum." Centuries of experience
with idlers who refused to work and who hung around on the
streets making a nuisance and sometimes a
menace of themselves were erased from our memories as the left
verbally transformed those same people
into a sacred icon, "the homeless."
As with swamps, what was once messy and smelly was now turned
into something we had a duty to
protect. It was now our duty to support people who refused to
support themselves.
Crimes committed by bums are covered up by the media, by
verbally transforming "the homeless" into
"transients" or "drifters" whenever they commit crimes. Thus
"the homeless" are the only group you
never hear of committing any crimes.
More to the point, third parties' notions are imposed by the
power of the government to raise our taxes to
support people who are raising hell on our streets and in parks
where it has often become too dangerousfor our children to
play.
The left has a whole vocabulary devoted to depicting people who
do not meet standards as people who
have been denied "access."
Whether it is academic standards, job qualifications or credit
requirements, those who do not measure up
are said to have been deprived of "opportunity," "rights" or
"social justice."
The words games of the left from the mantra of "diversity" to
the pieties of "compassion" are not
just games. They are ways of imposing power by evading issues of
substance through the use of
seductive rhetoric.
"Rights," for example, have become an all-purpose term used for
evading both facts and logic by saying
that people have a "right" to whatever the left wants to give
them by taking from others.
For centuries, rights were exemptions from government power, as
in the Bill of Rights. Now the left has
redefined rights as things that can be demanded from the
taxpayers, or from private employers or others,
on behalf of people who accept no mutual obligations, even for
common decency.
At one time, educators tried to teach students to carefully
define words and systematically analyze
arguments. They said, "We are here to teach you how to think,
not what to think."
Today, they are teaching students what to think political
correctness. Instead of knowledge, students
are given "self-esteem," so that they can vent their ignorance
with confidence
