Fascinating Thinking!!!!

One of the things that absolutely has fascinated  me in the wind battle  in Cape Vincent is how people come to decisions, and the logic they use.  It’s fascinating to watch people think and sometimes evolve.  If you are interested in this type of thing you might find the book “How We Decide” by Jonah Leher interesting.

For example the town board decision to threaten Dave LaMora with arrest over a three minute speaking time and to accelerate an easily diffused situation into a crisis. 

Or a point in time when several of our current board members would have let previous wind conflicted officials on the old board vote despite their conflicts, as long as our new board members ,then in WPEG, could have gotten the protective setback wind law they wanted…which the old board would not have voted for anyhow!!!  That one was real baffling and yet interesting.  I am going to let a bunch of conflicted people illegally vote on my wind law, when  in fact they won’t ever vote for it anyhow.

Real clever!!!

Or WPEG wanting to take a position of compromise with setbacks on industrial wind siting. Why did they feel they could take a position of compromise when in fact they had absolutely NOTHING to use to force a compromise. They had NO power to compromise even though they somehow thought they did.   Funny thing is, here we are today with a WPEG super majority town board and they are still trying to compromise and appease against Article X and they still don’t have power within that system to force any compromise since A-10 can simply preempt our wind zoning laws.  But they insist on appeasing the very system that has already taken their home rule rights away.

But staying on the decision making theme of this post, I saw this comment on the JLL blog about the CV Planning Board terminating the BP permit application.   It was another one that fascinated me.

“Anonymous said...

This is no time to risk a constitutional challenge of the Article X legislation. Also no time to risk accepting some of the deals that were made before by a very bad bunch of characters.
Mr. Macsherry!
Terminate that Bp application!
Then we will have a "first down" party and fight like hell to keep a New York State siting board out of Cape Vincent, NY.

 If we stay with the sports analogy,  there is not much to celebrate on a first down, especially if it’s the first one in a long game or the other side has already beaten the pants off you and it’s the last 30 seconds of the game!

But in the context of the CV wind game, just exactly  what the hell are we celebrating  even if the BP permit is terminated?   Where is the victory?  It is a pointless celebration and demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the game.  Whether  the BP permit is terminated or not  is functionally irrelevant if they can just come back through Article X and ram even more wind turbines down our throat with  no need whatsoever for the CV Planning Board permit.  This would be an absolutely classic case of the old saying of shutting the barn door long after the horses are gone!!!  Same goes for our zoning law that attempts to appease Article X by being “reasonable”, even though we have no clue what “reasonable” means.  Celebrating the termination of the BP permit is pointless if BP has lobbied the State into legislation that already strips our home rule rights away. Get it????  THEY DON’T NEED OUR DAMN PERMIT!!!!

And after we have this pointless celebration over absolutely nothing… I would LOVE to hear how this commenter intends to fight like hell to keep Article X out of CV, when in fact our town board has already willingly appeased and enabled and will cooperate with the Article X siting process and give it further power and legitimacy.   I would like to see the fascinating reasoning on that one!!!!!

Like I said all these lines of thinking and logic are fascinating!  And they just keep coming.