Tumbling Trees.

The latest reports are out on the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) eradication of the Asian longhorn beetle. The numbers are staggering, and those of you living in neighboring counties to those mentioned -- or neighboring states -- might want to take a long hard look at the numbers before you decide that it's not really anything you need to worry about.

New York, 1st detection in August 1996. They found 6,275 infested trees. They have removed 18,467 trees. That is roughly three times the amount that were 'sick'.

New Jersey. Since October 2002. 729 infested, 21,981 trees removed. This is 30 -- yes, 30 times the number of injured trees.

Massachusetts, August 2008. 22,264 infested, 31,925 removed.

Ohio June 2011. 9091 infested trees, 8809 removed.

The good people in Bethel, the most affected area in Ohio, are fighting to save their trees. They acknowledge the need for infested trees to be removed, but are objecting to the destruction of the healthy. For most tree owners, they would porefer to have the trees vaccinated.
Yes, that can be done.
It is even less expensive than tree cutters, and chippers, and mulchers, and cherry pickers and earth movers and fuel for machinery (checked the prices on the fuel lately? -- bet you have.)

I want you, wherever you are, to go out in your backyard, or to your closest, favorite public park.
Look around.
Pick a tree, any tree, since this is an exercise in imagination.
The tree you have selected is sick. It has a bug. This bug is not airborne (as they say about viruses). But the tree is sick.
Say "Good-bye, favorite tree."

Now look around and see the other trees.
See the three closest trees.
Say "good bye" to them.
They must be assassinated because their neighbor was sick.

But wait, the neighboring trees have neighbors too. Pick any number, 3 or 30 or any other number, of the neighboring trees' neighbors.
Say "good bye" to them, too. They are neighbors of the neighbors of the sick tree, so they, too, must die.

Now, look around your back yard, or your park.
Are there any trees left?
Is there any shade left in your yard?
Are there any windbreaks left around your house?
What will hold the soil in your yard when the snow melts or the rains pound down?


My friends, this can happen to you. Yes, you may live far away -- but with the likes of Superstorm Sandy, (and the USDA wasted no time laying down the law in New Jersey afterwards,) is anywhere far enough away? Yes, you may not have the specific species of bugs that are eating these species of trees.

But you DO have a government agency that says it can come in and remove and confiscate your personal property (trees) because they can.

Infested trees need to be removed. No one is arguing with that. And the government has every right to take those down at its expense for the public good.

But they are claiming the right to take down all the trees that might become bug-sick. Not just likely, but "maybe perhaps someday might."

If they are allowed to do that here, in the heart of Ohio, in the nation's scenic heart, why do you think they will stop when they get to your back yard? They will be able to point to New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Ohio as having established "THE" precedent.

Goodbye backyard.
Goodbye parks.
Goodbye trees.

Help the Bethel ALB group stop this trampling of property rights.
Before it becomes your rights that are lost.

http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=d9ab319101533a13ab1c45685&id=587ea78b12

Chaos in Colorado & the Right to Know

Last week, there was a shooting in Colorado. No doubt everyone has heard of it by now, and they've heard misleading quotes, incomplete assessments, rumors, outright lies, and everywhere the young man's name all over the news. We've seen it and him and he knows he's going down in the history books, so now he's going to act or claim crazy. (As if a sane person would shoot up a theater and booby trap his own home.)

I'm not naming him. There are enough people and mechanisms doing that, and that is what this young man is eating up. He's FAMOUS! He's INFAMOUS! He's on the Front Page, he's the LEAD Story, he's on YouTube, he's shared and reshared on Facebook and other social media.

Everyone knows his name. He can sit back and wallow now. And that's exactly what he's going to do.

To most of the public, especially the politically attuned, the Horrible Happening is a new reason to scream and open debates about gun control. It is somehow the fault of the guns that they were amassed and misused in this fashion.
To me, the issue should be about the media. The Fourth Estate.
We have freedom of the press. That's a good and wonderful thing.
Until something like this happens.

The  media is helpful when there is a question of locating a perpetrator or suspect. The media is at its best when reporting events as they unfold. The media is a force to be reckoned with when someone in the public eye is trying to hide secrets. The media tells us we have a right to know, and they will inform us. They can keep us informed of all rumors and speculations as long as they say they are rumors and speculation. Reporting of the booby traps may have saved lives.

But what, exactly, do we have a right to know about? What is needful and/or entertaining and informative? Do we need to know, on a national level, speculation and gossip?
 Is it right to be shoving their microphones into the faces of families waiting for someone to come outside from the scene of a massacre? Is it our right to know when they finally accept the unbelievable unacceptable fact that their loved one is not coming away from the scene?
Is it our right to know what a mother thinks when her son has admitted to this type of horror? Has she no right to the privacy of thought?
Do we have a right to know about every clipped toenail or late bedwetting incident ever in the guilty person's history?
Do we have the right to decide -- believe -- he's guilty before there is any sort of due process?
Does the media have the right to claim our right to know gives them the right to lionize punks and publicity hogs?

There are no easy answers, which is why the problems have been unresolved for so many years. There is a right to know, but who can or should decide what anyone else has the right to know?  Is there, or should there be, a time that it's right to know.

Difficult questions that need to be looked at and discussed and worked on as intently as gun control or defining insanity. It's no wonder that policing authorities try to conceal identities and evidence from the press. Irresponsible reporting compromises deaf, dumb, and blind justice.

And then, there  are young men like this "joker" who do the deed, then, when the media is fully present, walks up to the police and says "Yeah, I did it," then spends the next three days -- or three months, three years, three decades -- smirking and preening and posing for the cameras.


He has the right to know how important he is