Doubting Thomas Blog

Archive for the ‘news’ Category

Today’s Buffalo News has an editorial encouraging readers to make a comment on the latest stage of the planning process of a new Peace Bridge. I’m commenting on the Peace Bridge web site, but I’m also encouraging people to consider the following.

I’m still waiting for someone to explain why Buffalo would want a new Peace Bridge. The reasons that I’ve heard so far are unconvincing. Here are a few:

1. More traffic. Buffalo will benefit from having more trucks drive through it.
2. More tourists. Buffalo needs another architectural feature to draw people to its West Side.
3. More jobs. Buffalo needs the jobs that would be created for construction workers.

Let’s start with the last one, jobs. Who gets these jobs, residents of Buffalo? I don’t think so. Bridge construction is a specialized field, so the men and women working on a new bridge won’t be from Buffalo. And won’t half of the workers be Canadians?

Next up, tourists. From what I’ve seen of the plans, a new bridge will only be able to be seen from the highway–the already chopped up Front Park will lose even more of its space. There won’t be any place to park near it and take photos. Also, let’s say that there were a nice place to stand and take photos of the bridge. Can anyone point out how that would be a positive impact, economically? Are they seriously expecting a huge increase in postcard sales?

Lastly, more traffic? Seriously, who thinks that would be a good idea? More trucks means more pollution. More asthma for the residents of that neighborhood. More accidents. More noise. Fewer homes. I’ve heard people say that those trucks will stop and buy stuff as they pass through Buffalo. How can people really think that? A trucker who just spent a couple hours waiting to get through customs is not going to find the nearest coffee shop and take a break. Not going to gas up, either. Show me the statistics of how many truckers are currently stopping for gas or coffee once they cross the Peace Bridge.

So, WHY is a new Peace Bridge needed?

The mid-Atlantic is getting a lot of snow, and we want it. They are not capable of handling snow like we are, they don’t want it, they can’t do anything with it, and it’s way more dangerous to people in the Washington DC-area who have no clue how to drive on snowy roads than it is to people here in WNY who have 8 months of the year to practice our snowy-road driving.

Who among us Western New Yorkers doesn’t recall with fondness when we got 6 feet of snow in only 3 days? And wasn’t the October Storm, for all its semi-benign destruction of power lines and cable TV wires, the most calm and relaxing week-long natural disaster in history?

So, it seems odd to those of us who lived through those snowstorms to have to sit back and watch the weather radar, with that distinct line of clouds that just sits right below our border with Pennsylvania. And the constant updates on facebook from our friends in Virginia, the Washington-DC area, and eastern PA–bragging to us about how much snow they’re getting, and how much more is forecast to fall before the storm is over.

And here we are, with some snow on the ground, but without full coverage. Because some of our snow has melted or blown off our lawns, we’re literally green with envy.

I am glad I’m not a “normal weight” person, because, apparently, being a little overweight means I’m going to live a little longer.

A few extra pounds can add years to your life: study
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Carrying a little extra weight may actually be good for you, according to a Canadian study that showed a few pounds appear to protect people from an early death.

Researchers found that while underweight and extremely obese people die earlier than people of a normal weight, people who are slightly overweight actually live longer than those of a normal weight.

For the past couple days, people have been emailing me about a new search web site called cuil.com (cuil is supposed to be pronounced “cool” btw), so I checked it out.

Yep, it’s a search web site.

I don’t know what else to say. Except maybe this: I claim first coinage props for making cuil into a verb, as in, I cuiled my bike taxi business and found a ton of hits.

I spoke to a good friend of mine last night, who made me aware that today marks the deadline the chocolate industry set for itself of putting an end to the use of slave-produced cacao beans for chocolate.

Here’s a quote from an article in the Time magazine about it: …in Cote d’Ivoire, which produces some 40% of the world’s cocoa, tens of thousands of children are forced to work on plantations, many of them in virtual slavery….

More info is online at wikipedia.org: “Of the 200,000 children working in the Ivory Coast cocoa industry, a maximum of 6% (12,000 children) may be victims of human trafficking or slavery.” (Wikipedia links to this article.)

Here’s another article.

And here’s another article.

Today, I’m going to try to find a local store that sells chocolate that is not made from cocoa beans grown by slaves. My friend is asking everyone he knows to buy two such chocolate bars: One to keep, and one to give to someone else, to spread the word about the slave conditions, but also to show people that there are alternatives to slave-made chocolate.