Good Morning Florida Keys

Re yesterday’s the Florida Keys’ Jesus – development post, Sandy Downs told me last night that she can not wait to start enjoying The Hamptoms, No Name Key’s new name, compliments the former No Name Key environmentalists Brad Vickery and Beth Ramsay-Vickery.

Recieved at goodmorningfloridakeys.com this retort to yesterday’s post.  

Ed

boycottthefloridakeys@fla-keys-suck.com
Submitted on 2012/03/30 at 6:05 am
If you idiots don’t want anymore building in the Keys…..Buy the remaining private property…..John has plenty of money

John is John Hammerstrom of Key Largo, mentioned admiringly in yesterday’s post.

I retorted back:

Have no problem, personally, with someone building their dream home, to live in full time on property they bought on one of the Florida Keys, if that property does not, say, flood at high tide like a number of lots do in the abandoned subdivision where I live. I suppose that is why the subdivision was taken over/bought by the State of Florida and much of it turned into a state wildlife refuge. I do not view building such a home to live in, full time as development. We don’t need any more snowbirds, though. We don’t need any more condos or subdivisions, either, evidenced by all the homes for sale, foreclosures, upside down mortgages, still falling ad valorem values, thus still falling ad valorem taxes. I hope people who want to further develop the Keys boycott the Keys, never come down here. Never even think of coming down here. Steve Estes, Publisher and Editor of the News-Barometer, of Big Pine Key, put up an excellent report in today’s Friday edition about the wrangling going on over bringing electricity out to No Name Key. The pro-get-the-key on the grid folks talk about their US Citizen rights being violated, even though they violated those alleged rights themselves when they bought or built their homes on a key they knew was totally off the grid. But do you hear them ever admit that? Not a chance. What those with eyes and ears that work know is, what fuels this group of self-created victims is they have stars in their eyes over more development on No Name Key after it gets on the grid. They see their property values jumping. Some of them see themselves doing the developing. But do you ever hear them say that? Not a chance. Au contraire, they say they have no interest in further development of No Name Key. Am going to rustle up Steve Estes’ article and add it to the reply. Steve told me maybe a year ago that around the time Brad Vickery and his wife Beth bought their home on No Name Key (Beth is daughter of Marathon City Councilman Dick Ramsay, sister of Vice-Sheriff Dick Ramsay, both of whom attended Florida Keys Aqueduct meetings when running water out to No Name Key was on the agenda), that he, Steve, had gone online and looked at the website of the real estate development company Brad worked for in California, and there was an ad promoting the big quarry near Brad and Beth’s home on No Name Key as having development potential. Just yesterday evening, I was told by No Name Key residents that Brad recently had told another No Name Key resident that they were going to turn No Name Key into the Hamptons. Anyway, I’ll be back with Steve’s article in a little while.

BY STEVE ESTES
News-Barometer Editor
Monroe County commissioners have agreed to join with Keys Energy in defending an action by No Name Key resident Robert Reynolds in front of the state Public Service Commission.
Reynolds filed the action shortly after local Circuit Court Judge David Audlin dismissed a declaratory action by the county asking that the court make some final determinations on the county’s authority and responsibility regarding commercial power to No Name Key.
Audlin ruled that the PSC should have jurisdiction in the matter, a ruling which has been appealed by a group of power opponents on No Name Key and by the county. That legal question is still unanswered. In his filing to the PSC, Reynolds claims that the county’s rules are discriminatory against No Name Key because of its land use regulations prohibiting commercial power to the environmentally sensitive island.
Most of No Name Key is in a federal Coastal Barrier Resource System area where federal money is prohibited to be used to further any type of development, including the issuance of subsidized flood insurance and the use of Federal Emergency Management Agency post-storm funds for debris clean up and rehabilitation.
After a lawsuit seeking commercial power was turned away by the courts in 2001, the county rewrote its CBRS policies seeking to “bring our code in line with federal guidelines,” said the Growth Management Director at the time Tim McGarry. The prohibition was put in place at that time. The prohibition affects all CBRS units in the county, of which No Name Key is one of 15.
Reynolds also claims that state statute, policed by the PSC, gives Keys Energy, the local commercial power provider, absolute right to install power grids on public rights-of-way.
The county has never disputed that public rights-of-way are carte blanche for utility development, but the route selected by KEYS for the power grid to No Name Key crosses publicly owned lands, by Monroe County, and the Board of County Commissioners has denied the use of those rights-of-way for commercial power in CBRS units.
Reynolds also claims that No Name Key cannot meet the state’s upgraded wastewater mandates without commercial power, even though the state Department of Health says that solar-powered systems and generator-run systems will meet the new standards for best available technology. All of the homes on No Name Key are powered by solar arrays or generators or a combination of both.
The filing also claims that it would be cost-prohibitive for No Name Key residents to meet the state’s sewer mandate without commercial power. The cost for systems run on generator power are approximately the same as those run on commercial power.
Reynolds’ request to the PSC, which is to mandate that Monroe County step back from its land use prohibitions against commercial power on No Name Key, claims that the language in the PSC’s statutory authority is to “encourage” the delivery of power to areas that request it. County officials sought the declaratory action from the local courts to answer a question very similar to that claim.
The county’s comprehensive land use plan uses the word “discourage” for commercial power in a CBRS. It is the enabling land development regulations that say “prohibit.” The declaratory action dismissed by Judge Audlin sought to clarify that discrepancy.
The Reynolds’ filing asks the PSC to force the county to override its own land use rules and force the county to issue building permits for residents to hook into the lines, something county officials say they cannot do right now with the existing prohibition.
That was another of the questions county officials and KEYS sought to have clarified by the courts in the declaratory action.
Reynolds also claims that running commercial power to the island would not be a violation of the CBRS prohibition because the individual homes already have private power-generation sources. The prohibition speaks only to public utilities. KEYS is defined as a public utility, over which the PSC has “rate and service” jurisdiction, according to Reynolds’ filing.
KEYS Utility Board, which earlier this month approved a line extension agreement with the 25 No Name properties seeking commercial power, has asked that the PSC dismiss Reynolds claim as moot because the line extension agreement has been signed. The filing was against KEYS. The KEYS board took the action over the recommendation of its attorney who suggested that action be delayed until the legal issues had been ironed out.
If the PSC case is dismissed, “It certainly leaves the underlying questions for another day,” said Bob Shillinger, chief assistant county attorney. Shillinger said without a court ruling negating them, the county must stand behind its land use rules.
“WE have a valid ordinance prohibiting commercial power to CBRS units that hasn’t been declared invalid by any court,” said Shillinger.
The Board of County Commissioners last week authorized the county attorney’s office to attempt to become an intervenor in the PSC case.
The PSC is being asked, said Shillinger, to declare that the county has no authority to enforce its own land use rules. The vote was unanimous to file an intervenor request in the case. If the case is dismissed by the PSC, said Shillinger, the county would have no reason to try and intervene, “But we are left with a valid
ordinance that hasn’t been ruled otherwise.”
If the county has to file briefs in the PSC case, Shillinger said the argument would be that the PSC has limited jurisdiction to handle limited issues dealing with rates and services, territorial disputes and other like issues, but that whether the county has to ignore its own land use regulations “falls outside their jurisdiction.”
On the heels of the KEYS utility board approval of the line extension agreement earlier this month, the utility immediately began work trying to re-institute the agreement it had begun last year. That agreement was put on hold until the underlying land use jurisdiction questions could be answered by the courts.
According to KEYS Spokesman Julio Barroso, KEYS has sent the project back out for bids under a Request for Proposals format.
“We can’t begin any construction on the project until we have those back,” said Barroso. “The will be about two months.”
The RFP on the street right now mirrors the one that KEYS used last year, and includes the use of the county-denied private easements for routing the power grid.
“If it turns out that we can’t use the county easements, then we can work around that and find alternate solutions,” said Barroso. “We would have to negotiate a change order with the selected contractor.” Any increase in price would be paid for by the No Name Key property owners. He added that KEYS has received a check for the estimated total amount of the project, just over $650,000, paid for by the No Name residents who want commercial power.
As part of the line extension agreement, the residents must also establish an escrow account to repair the grid in the event it is damaged by storms because the utility can’t use FEMA money in a CBRS area for that purpose.
As part of the agreement, No Name property owners are also on the hook for any legal fees KEYS incurs while litigating the various legal issues surrounding the project.
Barroso said whether that includes the utility attorneys currently working on the PSC case is “still under discussion.”
KEYS’ legal staff still has to chime in on the appeal filed by the opponents of commercial power to Judge Audlin’s ruling.
Barroso said no date has yet been set to act on KEYS’ motion to dismiss, or the underlying request by Reynolds.

——————–

When I see that kind of money thrown by private property owners at something in the Keys, in the face of a heap of opposing land development laws and regulations, I smell one thing – DEVELOPMENT. I already published that Judge Audlin had a conflict of interest and should have recused himself from the No Name Key case re Keys Energy running electricity out there. The conflict of interest lay in Audlin, before he was a judge, being a mediator in the 1991 No Name Key court case, presided over by Judge Payne. Audlin recommended letting Keys Energy run electricity out to No Name Key, and Judge Payne didn’t go along with Audlin’s recommendation. The more I hear about Robert Reynolds, the more I think maybe he is a dethroned despot on the lam from some foreign country, such as USA. I cannot imagine where the Keys Energy Board members came from, ignoring their own lawyer’s advice. Oh, dumb me. They all live in Key West, the supreme role model for paving the Florida Keys. Marathon ain’t that far behind, though.

Sloan Bashinsky

keysmyhome@hotmail.com

No Name Key – the new Hamptons

From a fellow near Miami, who is seriously into saving the Everglades from development, politicians, chambers of commerce, realtors, and other usual suspects. He compares his apparently fairly recent visit in India, and his assessment of its government, corporations, environmental treatment, with what is going on around the Everglades. My reply wandered a bit into my own experience in India, then back to the usual suspects in the Florida Keys.

 
From: afarago@__________
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:12:43 -0400
Subject: Editorial in Counterpunch, FYI

A Visit to India Is Hard to Leave Behind: What Separates New Delhi from the Everglades?

by Alan Farago

At two in the morning, the sleek, modern airport at New Delhi hummed with activity. Most travelers pointed westbound to European capitals and from there, mid morning connections to the Americas.
What piqued my curiosity at that ungodly hour: airport security worked at half pace while the crowds piled behind. For the most part, India’s bureaucratic indifference was far from sight during a three-week visit.
Here at the moment of departure, anxious lines pushed and security responded with its own laws of gravity, and I felt the curious pull of the familiar, something that reminded me of home. You know what they say about Schenectady: it’s not hell but you can see it from there?
The places that hold us, whether in Uttar Pradesh or New York, have their tell tales. For example, in Florida –my home–, the sign of the eternal, damning wheel is the predisposition of bureaucrats to work hand-in-glove with politicians and lobbyists to destroy the Everglades.
In her new novel, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo describes the lives of urban poor living hard by the Mumbai International Airport. She reminds us that it is not what you see that drives a nation, but what you don’t: “… for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.”
Indeed. In Florida, the economic crash was fueled by housing speculators exploiting cheap swamp land. Corruption in the zoning, permitting and financing of crappy subdivisions fed the Wall Street derivatives machine.
At face value it may not seem fair to compare the jostling poverty of hundreds of millions of Indians—whose cultural chasms span thousands of years— to decomposing ghost suburbs and those sliding off the economic ladder in the former Everglades. On the other hand, as the pie shrinks in the United States, scarcity breeds contempt even among the right-thinking. Here is one example.
Twenty years ago when I moved to Miami, Florida International University was at the furthest developed edge of western Dade County. Sprawl grew around it. Today, its campus holds an office of policy and science staff funded by the federal government to restore the Everglades. The $16 billion restoration is the most complex and large scale ever undertaken. Recently the university went to the Florida legislature and buried in a long budget bill for water management a provision that would have swapped land on its campus for state-owned wetlands even closer to the Everglades where it hoped to kill two birds with one stone: move a county theme park now on its property into wetlands, inevitably attracting gas stations, restaurants and housing while clearing space on its own campus.
The emigration functionary in his cardigan vest at New Delhi international airport is not so different from the Miami Dade county official in his guayabera, who makes a performance of weighing the costs and benefits of rezoning wetlands that protect the Everglades while he does at the end what comes naturally: stamp the approval and move the line forward.
On the day of our departure, we visited the home of Mahatma Gandhi. A modest residence and serene grounds celebrate one of India’s saints. On a poster inside the house, Ghandi is quoted: “I want to realize brotherhood or identity not merely with the beings called human, but I want to realize identity with all life, even with such things as crawl on earth, I want, if I don’t give you a shock, to realize identity with even the crawling things upon the earth, because we claim descent from the same God, and that being so, all life in whatever form it appears must be essentially one.”
As Candide concluded, “Let us cultivate our own gardens.” But gardens, to whom? Tend our gardens, and we tend ourselves. But gardens, for whom? In the U.S., one man’s public commons is another man’s private garden. India makes mincemeat of that distinction.
From the air conditioned comfort of a Toyota SUV marked tourist with white cloth covers on the seats, we spied a farmer astride a cart and ox circling a water wheel. As we sped by, I imagined if that farmer doesn’t resent the idea of gardens, surely his children will.
On a stretch of road to Jaipur, coal fired kilns attached to smokestacks dotted the landscape where workers stacked bricks made by hand in long, thick walls. Who will tell them they cannot use coal or only with expensive cleansers to fire their work?
One night at dinner, I asked a fellow traveler: how do we go on? What do we tell generations to come? She reminded me of a Bill Moyers interview with the late Joseph Campbell.
JC: There’s a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva…the Bodhisattva, the one whose being, “sattva”, is illumination, “bodhi”…who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder…and come back…and participate in it. All life is sorrowful is the first Buddhist saying, and it is! It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved, which is sorrow, loss…loss…loss.
BM: That’s a pessimistic note.
JC: Well, I mean you gotta say yes to it and say it’s great this way, I mean this is the way God intended it …
BM: You don’t really believe that?
JC: But this is the way it is. And I don’t believe anybody intended it but this is the way it is. And Joyce’s wonderful line, you know, “history is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” And the way to awake from it is not to be afraid (sic) … all of this, as it is…is as it has to be… it is a manifestation of the eternal presence in the world. The end of things always is painful… pain is part of there being a world at all.
BM: But if one accepted that, isn’t the ultimate conclusion to say that I won’t try to form any laws or fight any battles, or…
JC: I didn’t say that…
BM: Isn’t the logical conclusion…couldn’t one draw that though? The philosophy of nihilism?
JC: Well, that’s not the necessary thing to draw…you could say that “I will participate in this row and I will join the army and I will go to war…”
BM: “…I’ll do the best I can…”
JC: “I will participate in the game.” It’s a wonderful, wonderful opera…except that it hurts. And that wonderful Irish saying you know, “Is this a private fight or can anybody get into it?” This is the way life is. And the hero is the one who can participate in it decently, in the way of nature, not in the way of personal rancor, revenge or anything of the kind.
Homeward bound, I opened an April 2010 report by the McKinsey Global Institute, “India’s Urban Awakening: Building inclusive cities, sustaining economic growth”.
The McKinsey report wets the appetite for profit to be made from the inevitable explosion of population and growth of India’s current and future urban cities. In the next 20 years, India’s GDP will multiply 5 times. 590 million people will live in cities, nearly twice the population of the U.S. today, the fastest addition to an urban population in history outside of China.
Nature is playing havoc with India as it is. New Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Udaipur, Varanasi, Orissa,– wherever I traveled in India the landscape was covered with a gauzy blanket of smog. On an otherwise sunny day the sundials at the magnificent World temples of Karnack, more than 1300 years old, could not cast a shadow because of the smog. This metric of measurement never made it into the McKinsey Global Management report. “Despite the fact that India’s urbanization is already under way and will continue unabated, and that it offers undoubted economic benefits, India as not fully engaged with the reality of its urban future.”
It is our nature to advance our fortunes. How do we do that, when the monsoons no longer support crops cycles or intermittently provide runoff from the Himalayas?
In a NPR interview, Katherine Boo said that what troubled her most about Mumbai was, first, witnessing the level of ordinary, every day corruption and second, as a result, watching how corruption wears away and “abrades” moral and ethical behavior.
A few days before leaving, we took a long walk on a beach fronting the Bay of Bengal. In the middle of the beach, the remains of a highway abutment rose from the sands like an ancient ruin. It had been attached to a road that ran the length of the coast parallel to the beach until it was all washed away. The sea reclaimed it all. The road was only fifty years old.
The bridge abutment and its remains rising from the sands seemed a visible, present symbol of our ruined claims of progress. Then I came upon the turtle. The beach at Orissa is known as one of the most prolific turtle nesting sites on the planet.
I have always taken the sound and sight of a turtle raising its head in the Florida Straits—breathing in a startling exhale, perhaps in contemplation of us—to be a miracle connecting to hundreds of millions of years of evolution, long before mankind’s race to the top of the food chain.
A few hundred yards from the bridge abutment I spotted the turtle bobbing in the shore break. On closer inspection; it was indeed a massive turtle—dead as my father used to say as a door nail. Part of the carapace was gone. Its eye sockets were alabaster white. The mottled flesh of its limbs were still soft, life-like to the touch and pressure of lapping waves.
In Hindu cosmography, the turtle has a sacred place. He is the second incarnation of the great God Vishnu. Once, in the distant past—before passport control officials gazed at sighing travelers and yawned, before commissioners in Florida stamped rezoning of Everglades wetlands with the laconic efficiency of transit officials viewing hand baggage through airport Xray machines, in Hindu myth the turtle carried the earth on its back to save it from being swallowed by angry seas.
Speeding over the Atlantic, on the way home to Florida, it is hard to imagine such parallel worlds exist. Billions of Indians and Asians struggle to elevate from poverty at the same time as the West reels from serial financial crises tied to speculation; an insane response to the sudden “flattened” globalized economy that turns out to be more like an ice skating rink than a cricket pitch.
According to McKinsey, Europe has 35 cities with population over 1 million. India has 42 and by 2030 will have 68. Mumbai and New Delhi will be two of the five largest cities in the world. “We estimate that India needs to invest $1.2 trillion just in capital expenditure in its cities over the 20 years… that’s almost eight times the level of spending today in per capita terms.”
On the beach at Orissa with a pall of smog concealing the ostensibly blue sky with a thick haze, I kept company with the dead turtle casting its bits into the sea, flesh parting, remains to be scavenged by the vigilant. I wouldn’t linger to witness that market efficiency.
I would be gone, flying above Afghanistan and Iran, above the drones, above the wounded and the terrified, unwrapping silverware from its cloth sleeve. Bound for the next market efficiency: Everglades wetlands converted to whatever makes the fastest buck for the Great Destroyers. Where is home? Isn’t home, here? Doesn’t one do for a home, as one would do for one’s garden?
India has not been party to international agreements to limit the emission of carbon dioxide and other pollutants; agreements that appear to have collapsed in a heap under various strains of nationalism including the American conception of the United States as the city shining on a hill, sea level rise be damned.
Maybe McKinsey Global, with its neutral, business school-polished prose, is right. India will master its internal distances and schisms. State governments will gain control over coal-fired kilns and their operators. The ox and the driver will keep turning the water wheel. Cell phones and satellite TV will proliferate. Mega-cities will blossom and all gardens will grow.
The racing sun soon overtakes us, westbound. One of these days, we will experience compassion and humility at the heart of this dance between cultures and civilizations in the midst of climate change. Moments of kindness will be lit, and extremism will be refused on the planet we set afire. We will lay down our swords to feed who is left. I don’t know when that moment will come, but I foresee turtles finning where we walked, first.
 

Hi, Alan. Thanks for sharing your article.

In late May 2000, what jumped out at my wife and I riding a taxi away from the Mumbai airport, toward the waterfront, hopefully to find an affordable hotel, which happened, was the massive community of people living outside in very close quarters, in mud, if they did not have cardboard boxes to sit or lie on. Stacked in there almost shoulder to shoulder as far as the eye could see. I wondered where they got drinking water? Where they relieved themselves? I had thought the massive shanty towns outside of major South African cities were shocking. The shanty towns were palatial compared to what I saw leaving the Mumbai airport.

The hotel we found was about two city blocks down the same street from the Taj Mahal, a 5-star hotel. A double room for one night was, as I recall, $1,500 US (we paid $50 US a night at our hotel). Sheiks were in the lobby. People in very expensive western clothing. Platial, made any hotel in the Keys look like a shanty town. Outside on the sidewalk were young girls with infants on their hips, begging.

Three days was all we could take in India. More than we could take. We were sick from what we were absorbing from the spirit. My wife had excellent spirit vision; she said driving in from the airport, all she could see in the air was serpents. I said, not the nice friendly serpents on the Saturday morning cartoons. No, not like those, she said. I could never compare India to America, nor America to India. Each are evolving their own version of hell, in my opinion.

The Buddhist first precept that all of life is suffering seems pretty right on. Joyce’s view of history I feel sympathy with, also. But I think perhaps the bodhisattva is not entirely understood by Buddhists. Perhaps once upon a time a lama was about to cross over and sensed he would not leave the karmic wheel and somewhat in denial he came up with being a bodhisattva to save face, so he vowed to keep coming back until all sentient beings on this planet reached enlightenment; wasn’t going to happen, given how things went for this species after that. Perhaps that one lama became the Buddhist version of Christ returned, which other lamas and Buddhists attempted to follow.

I spent a great deal of time and effort trying to make things better. Have about twenty books and three websites testifying to it. Doesn’t seem to have made any difference in the big scheme of things, perhaps some people benefited individually. Looks to me this species – homo sapiens – is seriously on the wane. Looks to me there will be no turn around absent something totally out of the box. Perhaps a big asteroid strike, like what scientists say did in the dinosaurs, and homo sapiens start all over. Perhaps ETs arrive and turn everyone’s thinking upside down. Perhaps Jesus returns and does the same. Perhaps a giant solar flare cooks all life on the surface of this planet to extinction. Perhaps some military-industrial complex company invents a biological weapon that gets loose and exterminates homo sapiens.

I ran for the county commission three times down here in The Asteroid Belt. My mantra each time was, “No more new development, period the end. The Keys already are over-developed and there is not a person in the Keys who can look in a mirror and honestly argue otherwise.” You might think the majority of the people in the fragile Keys would have lunged for that mantra. Didn’t happen. Won’t happen. Development still is viewed as the Keys’ Jesus, even with thousands of homes for sale and about as many upside down mortgages/foreclosures in the past few years. Madness, spelled GREED. You see plenty of same up your way; you write about it, fight it.

Amendment 4 would have stopped it pretty well. I campaigned hard for Amendment 4 down here, wrote on my websites and said at candidate forums that Amendment 4 was the most important thing on the ballot. Only in the Keys county did Amendment 4 get a majority of the votes cast, a bare majority. Everywhere else in Florida, even where you live, adjacent to the Everglades, Amendment 4 was slaughtered at the polls. But even if Amendment 4 had gotten a majority in Florida, it would have failed, because developers, Realtors and Chambers of Commerce had gotten a constitutional amendment passed requiring a 60 percent vote to pass a constitutional amendment. That was aimed directly at Amendment 4.

For many reasons, looks to me, on its own, the species homo sapiens is destined to disintegrate, and in its downward spiral, it will disintegrate this planet until the planet, or nature, or the ETs, or the angels assigned to this planet put a stop to it.

Here’s a teaser for a somewhat related post I published today to the goodmorning websites:

God – the Catch 22 of all Catch 22s

Allan replied:

Thanks for the note, Sloan.

I know how hard you have worked to make things better in the Keys.

All the best,

Alan

Ran into John Hammerstrom of Key Largo yesterday at Good Food Conspiracy on Big Pine Key. John said the usual suspects are trying to get a law passed in Tallahassee that will lengthen the time the State of Florida requires the Florida Keys to be allowed to evacuate for a hurricane. The point, of course, if that happens, more development can be allowed in the Keys than is now allowed under the current 24-hour mandatory evacuation requirement, which itself is a joke, because there is no way the Keys can be evacuated in 24 hours, even if there is not a wreck at, say, Kemps Channel Bridge, which, as happened last week, stacked up traffic 5 miles both ways on US 1. I know, because I was caught in the northbound stack up, about a mile below Sugarloaf School. It took them about 2 1/2 hours to get traffic moving after a jeep passing traffic head-on’d a van coming the other way, carrying 11 people.

Everyone in the Keys, who isn’t sound asleep, knows the hurricane evacuation schedule has zero to do with saving lives, and everything to do with how much new development is allowed in the Keys. John said, what it boils down to is, which takes precedence, private property right protected by the US Constitution, or people’s right to life and safety, also protected by the US Constitution. Of course, we both know the answer in the Keys is private property rights take precedence, and always have. But how would a court of law come down on that? John said, when he spoke with Chief Assistant County Attorney Bob Shillinger about it, Bob said there does not seem be any case directly in point. I told John, I was pretty sure, historically the courts have subordinated private property rights to human safety. But and again, this is the Florida Keys, and we all know, who are not sound asleep, that private property rights are more important than anything in the Keys. Don’t take my word for it, though – ask Mother Nature. Ask No Name Key, where Brad Vickery is said to be saying “We are going to turn it into the Hamptoms.”

I don’t have to go to India, or even to the edge of the Everglades, to know what is wrong with this picture. All I have to do is go down to Key West and drive around. All I have to do is drive around any Key where there are paved roads. Development is the Keys’ jesus, has been ever since the new and bigger waterline was built down from the mainland with the new and wider bridges and roads.

Sloan Bashinsky

keysmyhome@hotmail.com

As I watched the newish moon rise over Venus yesterday evening, I recalled Luna is a name sometimes used for the moon. Then I recalled lunatic is derived from Luna. Then I connected some dots and noted lunacy is the result of serious disturbance in the feminine aspect of a person. Same applies to a country. Same applies to a species. In this case, homo sapiens. But that’s too broad a topic to cover today.

Letter to the Editor in The Key West Citizen this morning:

Reality doesn’t match the campaign rhetoric

We’ve been up to our eyeballs in campaign rhetoric for the past few months, but a couple of large items have been left conspicuously out of frame.

While they lament the current administration’s willingness to print money with no end in sight, each of the candidates has studiously avoided explaining why the previous Republican White House felt secure in doubling the national debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion over the course of just two terms. The U.S. went from being the world’s largest creditor to the world’s biggest debtor in just eight years of Republican stewardship. How can such a vast increase in taxpayer obligation have occurred under “conservative” stewardship? Those are some really big numbers.

Let’s look at something that also requires a Ph.D. in economics to comprehend — affordable health care insurance. The candidates bewail what they see as the irresponsibility of people in lower tax brackets to sponge off regular taxpayers, like you and me, when they show up in hospital emergency rooms without a valid health insurance policy.

Suppose we are working at a minimum wage job and we get into a traffic accident on the way to work. At $7.21 an hour, we’re earning about $288 a week, or $1,154 a month, pretax. If we had been responsible citizens and budgeted for regular, market rate health insurance, we would be paying $800 to $900 a month for a basic policy. That would leave us about $75 a week, tops, for frivolities like rent, food, children’s education and laundry. Oh, and income tax. The numbers, quite clearly, do not work out.

And it’s not just Republicans. No one, it seems, has a magic bullet for these difficult budget dilemmas. We have more productive capacity, way more, than we know what to do with, period. That’s not an easy problem to resolve, but we can at least focus on the root causes of that monster problem and not continue to bathe ourselves in mind numbing waves of misdirection. In the months to come, let’s hope the Democrats do not also elect, rhetorically, to “blame the cops for the crime rate.”

Paul Williams
Key West

I have yet to hear from any President Obama basher one iota of admission that President Bush plunged America deep into debt. It’s as if there was no other president before President Obama. It’s as if President Bush did not start two foreign wars and lower taxes on the Richliklans, something no other president, not even a Richliklan president, had ever dreamed of doing. All I hear from President Obama bashers, I get plenty of perjured political and religious forwards bashing him, is they will vote for any Richliklan candidate who ends up with the nomination, no matter who he is (no she’s in sight this year). It’s their religion to vote against President Obama. It’s their fanaticism.

While I do not hold a PhD in economics, I do hold a B.A. in economics from Vanderbilt University. I minored in business administration. I later worked a few years for a fairly large Alabama corporation, by Alabama standard. I learned you don’t spend money you do not have. You do not borrow money you cannot repay. Not if you want to remain in business. Not if you want to stay out of the US Bankruptcy Court. But there’s the rub. While US citizens and corporations and the states and municipalities have to live within their means, Uncle Sammy does not. He does not, quel dommage, have to worry about the US Bankruptcy Court or being homeless, because he can borrow money and raise taxes – translates, he can counterfeit US greenbacks, which is a prison offense for anyone else. It once was a capital offense, equivalent to treason.

Imagine if Uncle Sammy, be he Richliklan or Demoncrat, or whatever, had to live within his means. Imagine what that would do to Washington, D.C. Imagine what that would do to every US Representative and Senator. Imagine what that would do to every US President. Why, it would cause them to be FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE. It would cause them to give up all of their petty pet screw all the US taxpayers but their home constituents schemes. It would cause them to stop voting for deficit spending. It would cause them to stop waging wars for which there is no money to pay the troops and arms manufacturers and oil and chemical companies which enable Uncle Sammy to wage those wars. It would cause them to stop paying for Uncle Sammy’s overseas military bases. It would cause them to stop subsidizing Israel. It would be the end of foreign aid. It would be the end of corporate tax breaks and bailouts. It would be the end of oil depletion allowances and R & D write-offs. It would be the end of private school subsidies. It would be the end of farm subsidies. It would be the end of all bailouts. It would be the end of THE RICHLIKLANS AND THE DEMONCRATS.

The Richiliklans religiously forget the big river in Africa, when they blame President Obama for all the corporate bailouts President Bush invented. Oh, but bailing out Detroit and Wallstreet and big banks was the American thing to do, it was patriotic, thus it was not a bailout – it was national defense, homeland security. It was mom’s apple pie. De Nilists have such short memories. Even as they rightly, I think, attack President Obama’s mandatory national health insurance plan, for which an article in The Citizen today indicates questions from the US Supremes do not bode well. Seems one of the Supremes wants to know if a national law can be passed requiring Americans to eat brocoli, or beets, or corn bread? Or whatever. What does Uncle Sammy intend to do to Americans who, as Paul Williams asks, cannot pay into his national health care plan? Are they arrested and sent to prison? Are their bank accounts seized? Are their wages garnished? What idiot mind dreamt this up?

I spent some time in Costa Rica in 2000. I learned Costa Rica has universal health care. The total cost to me was about $29 for getting logged into their records. All the rest was free. Perhaps $10,000 in medical treatment, including surgery, drugs, aftercare, from being torn up by a German shepherd. And I wasn’t even a Costa Rican. I was a white gringo, who did not even hablas Espanol, which is the Costa Rican language. Now how could that happen, that I was treated for free? If you can’t figure it out, you must be a Richliklan or a Demoncrat. You could not be a Paulian. No way could you be a Paulian, because a Paulian already would have shouted because Costa Rica has NO MILITARY!!! And there you are, folks. There is the reason America is so SNAFU’d economically. It spends more money on its military than all the other countries in the world combined spend on their military. Ron Paul would bring all the troops home. As would I, were I El Presidente. We will need them all home soon enough anyway, to defend Americans from Americans.

Meanwhile, to the Richliklans who keep sending me forwards bashing President Obama for letting in wetbacks who do not speak English, while ignoring how many wetbacks who did not speak English President Bush let into Texas when he was its governor because Texas’ economy would be bankrupt if it did not let in wetbacks to do all the low-paying hard sweaty jobs Americans won’t do. To the Richliklans who don’t want anyone in America but natural born American citizens who speak natural born American English, do you have a clue what would happen to the national economy if you get your way? Are you going to do the low-paying hard sweaty jobs the wetbacks are doing? Of course you are not going to do those jobs. You are going to export them to China and Indonesia and Mexico, where your NAFTA factories are because the labor is so cheap. You are so De Nile’d up that you don’t even remember your mother and father’s first names. So, instead of embarrassing you by asking you what their first names are, let me ask you what Uncle Sammy will do to Americans who cannot afford his mandatory health insurance? Right, deport them for unAmerican activity.

Don’t ask me what the cure is for $4 a gallon regular gasoline. I have no clue what the cure for that is. Nor does anyone else. Perhaps, hmmm. Sorry, nothing comes to me other than walking, riding bicycles and horses, or donkeys. Wonder how my Vanderbilt economics professors and Kappa Alpaha Order white-supremacist Christian fraternity brothers would cotton to that?

For how Uncle Sam’s lunacy bleeds down into the alleged capitol of the Asteroid Belt, here is a link to Sandy Downs’ and my Key West Tree Commission interview with Matt Gardi on Konknet a while back. It’s about a 5-minute download on my laptop.

Download the file – Naked Conch_031612_Sloan_Sandy Downs.mp3

Sloan Bashinsky
keysmyhome@hotmail.com

There is a Major Bashinsky death post fallout … post today at goodmorningbirmingham.com. Meanwhile …

Received this from Connie Gilbert of Key West. She has been on my email hit list for some years now.

Sloan, is that you?!? I was trying to access my email from the botanical garden, where I volunteer every Fri afternoon (it’s verrrry slow at the moment, and my home computer has issues) and this popped up. Did my op ed piece in the Citizen — sometime early Nov., I think — address any of your concerns? My point was that we’re not into fundraisers beyond free will donations at our programs — as the rescreening of George Clooney’s deeply affecting documentary, “Playground”–he’s co-producer–this Sunday 2-4 at Casa Marina. And that money goes to the film distributor, as did most of that which we were given at the Jan. rally at KWHS. I also have secret info that will destroy the “not in the Keys” argument but await permission to reveal it. Tell your folks about “Playground” please! –cg

Hi, Connie.

Didn’t see your op ed piece.

First I’ve heard of “Playground”. Googled it, Clooney, didn’t see anything.

What is the “not in the Keys” argument?

What secret info?

I need to know a lot more.

Sloan

Phone is too primitive but all I’ve got; Clooney co-produced film–please come!–argument is that we’re wrong to pursue issue as it doesn’t happen here. Fear it happens everywhere! Haven’t won back Dennis but I’m still hopeful. Come see the film tomorrow 2-4 at Casa Marina — and we’ll talk–will make copy of op-ed for you.

Sent from my iPhone

Connie

Perhaps State Attorney Dennis Ward, who initially was on Keys Coalition’s board of directors.

I wrote back to Connie:

Might come down to check it out, but I don’t even know what the issue is.

I wrote later:

Spoke with Todd German just now re several things. Then, I asked if he knew what the thing at Casa Marina is about? He said it is a continuation of Tim Gratz’s thing I wrote a good bit about last year.

I wrote not favorably to Tim, nor about the local people letting him throw their names around to promote his cause.

Child sex trafficking is horrible. However, I wish you had told me who is behind the Casa Marina event this p.m. That you did not, that you furnished no details, not even an explanation of the subject, after I told you I needed a lot more, disturbs me, Connie. As does your lending your name to Tim Gratz.

I told Todd I don’t need to see a documentary to know how bad this problem is, but it is not a problem the Keys currently face. Even so, I might get nudged to come down there later today, to observe how Gratz is going about it now, and perhaps to report on that, as well as the film.

Sloan

Connie replied:

Sorry for silence, but computer has been down and this is the first I’ve gotten to mail since yesterday. Hope this afternoon allayed some concerns. Tim is overenthusiastic and not socially/PR savvy, but his heart’s in the right place; he’s also very bright and devoted to the cause. Pls suspend judgment for a bit.

Sent from my iPhone

Connie

 I, Sloan, felt horrible yesterday, and spent much of the day in bed, napping. Didn’t want to go anywhere, but in my third nap, Tiger Woods came to me in a dream and by the time the dream was over and I was waking up again, feeling mostly dead, I understood I was to go down to the Keys Coalition event.

I arrived about 2:45, the movie was showing. Someone handed me a sign-up sheet, which I said I would not sign because I did not want my name on it being shown around later, implying I was recommending Keys Coalition.

I watched about fifteen minutes of the film. It was about really bad stuff, both sex trafficking and sexual child abuse, which are related but not the same thing. The different stories were horrible, but there was too much and I was wearing out fast. Several people left, who were there when I arrived. I went over to Connie and said it was too much, they were running people away with the movie about something I thought everyone there already knew about. I asked her to go outside with me, which she did.

I said what is in the film indicates the state of humanity, the problem is very old and is world-wide. There is no solution. Connie said, like the fall of Rome. I said, like the fall of humanity. The Keys Coalition woman Connie was working with, sorry her name escapes me, came out and said Tim had stopped the movie and was talking. We went back inside.

Tim seemed sincere. He described efforts to get legislation passed in Florida to make it a crime to advertise/promote child pornography/sex trafficking online. He said they were trying to get other legislation passed, allowing victims sue the people who lured them into it.

I said there might be federal/state interstate law conflicts, and in any event, better to get a federal law passed to stop the online promotion. Put the perps in prison. I said a law allowing for civil damage lawsuits against perps was not a good idea because it would lure young people to get involved in sex trafficking so they could later file suit and collect big damages.

A woman in the audiences said she was a clinical social worker, and when she lived in Ohio, I think was the state she said, they passed laws against this sort of thing up there. It looked great on paper, but in effect and enforcement, nothing came of it. She said it is well known that girls who run away from home tend to get into sex trafficking. She did not sound enthusiastic about making much headway.

One segment of the film spoke of the Stockholm syndrome. Kids who get involved with sex traffickers end up liking and wanting to protect them. Make prosecution nigh to impossible.

Someone said kids in foster homes get sexually abused.

I said sexual abuse is widespread.

There was discussion of the 211 help line and the 1-888-3737-888 hotline. I said a local hotline is needed for sex trafficking and sexual abuse.

I suggested they forget about Florida and the rest of the US, and focus their efforts on trying to keep child sex trafficking out of the Keys.

They did not produce any evidence yesterday of child sex trafficking in the Keys. The one case Connie had raised in her email, Tim said at the meeting involved an 18-year old girl in Key West, who had escaped from someone she was working for. Perhaps she was lured in when she was a minor.

I left the meeting with Jenna Stauffer, who had been introduced during the meeting as a television journalist with local channels 19 and 77. I told her people who get involved in causes such as this need to be very careful, because often it is about them. I said Connie and I both had to be very careful, because we both were molested in childhood. I was trained not to project my wounding into causes that resembled my wounding, but it was hard for Connie not to do that, as is it hard for anyone not to do that, including me.

That is similar to the Stockholm syndrome. A cause comes along, which is about what happened to us, and we jump in all the way because it is ourselves we are trying to save. I wish I could save every child from what I saw in that movie, but I know I cannot, and I frankly see no way to do much about it.

I knew yesterday that I was being taken once again into when I molested my younger sister, when I was 15, about which I wrote in posts a few months ago. I also knew I was being taken back into my mother molesting me. I thought child sex trafficking is horrible, but it is no worse than child molestation, which is far more common, to the extent it dwarfs child sex trafficking. Laws on the books have not stopped child molestation, and they will not, I don’t think, stop child sex trafficking, which is not limited to girls and young women. Young boys and young men are involved, too, although not as much.

Received these emails last night from Connie:

So glad you attended and all the points you raised were very good and I am considering them.

I am going to forward some things for your review.

One of the best anti-trafficking organizations that fights trafficking is the Polaris Project which runs the National Hotline. Your idea about a local hotline was interesting. The point about the Polaris number is that their operators are so well-trained.’

Here is a link to the Polaris Project:

http://www.polarisproject.org/

Attached is a copy of the laws passed in Washington state to criminalize posting sex ads for minors. Connecticut is considering a very similar law,
But we would agree it needs to be done on a federal level.

Here is a link to a news article on the proposed Connecticut law:
http://www.rep-am.com/articles/2012/03/25/news/connecticut/doc4f675bc24a912636573225.txt

Note that it has a potential penalty of ten years in prison.

Here ia a link to the story about the Key West man held for trafficking.

The victim was not a minor but clearly held against her will.

http://www.examiner.com/strange-news-in-national/florida-key-s-man-derrick-wilson-charged-with-sex-trafficking

Should you decide to write on the Coalition, it is interesting but coincidental that this arrest occurred only two days before our meeting.

PS asked Tim to send you e-copy of my op-ed.

Sent from my iPhone

Connie

Don’t want to swamp you with e-mails so I will try to make this the last.

1. We agree I think that a priority ought to be the passage of a federal law making it a crime to knowingly or recklessly advertise a minor for sex on the internet..
We agree that those who do so ought to be jailed. I know that a county organization has little “clout”. I am working on pulling together a group of national or regional sntti-trafficking groups that will advocate such a change, for the next Congress.

2. You made a very interesting point that if minor victims of trafficking sold on the Internet are permitted to sue it might encourage girls to enter “the game” just so they could sue. No one else had raised this point before. I will think about it and circulate it to others who had been supporting the idea.

3. I agree with you that a primary goal should be prevention. One of the ways of accomplishing this might be identifying children who are at risk and getting them help. In fact, Rabbi Duda made this point at a meeting last November. If the point is helping troubled young people that becomes a meritorious objective in itself. Other than church groups, I am not sure if any social service agency in Monroe County performs this function. There is a very good but lengthy paper called to the effect “Treating Trafficking” as a health care issue. I’ll send it to you but only if you request.

Nicholas Kristof has been an advocate against child sex trafficking both internationally and domestically for years. In fact my interest in this was sparked by a piece he wrote for the NY Times that was reprinted in the Citizen.

Here is a recent piece he wrote about the internet marketing of young girls:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/opinion/how-pimps-use-the-web-to-sell-girls.html?_r=1

Totally agree with you that the people authorizing this stuff for economic gain deserve imprisonment.

———————————-

It probably is no consolation to people who were sexually molested in childhood, or were lured into child sex trafficking, but I can say for a fact that I was not allowed to get away with what I did to my sister. I was given an affliction that destroyed my life, as I knew it. Eventually, everyone who abuses a child is tried, convicted and sentenced, if not in this life, then in the hereafter. As Jesus said in the Gospels, woe be unto anyone who harms even a hair on the head of a child.

I found myself thinking last night, as important as prevention of child sex trafficking in the Keys is, providing counseling to children, and also to adults, who were sexually molested or involved in sex trafficking is just as important. The soul wounding in such people is horrific. It really cannot be resolved by human therapeutic methods, but it can be alleviated some, and that can open the door to angelic healing, such as I received, such as I have seen a few women I have known well receive.

Such healing is not of this world and is not easy. In fact, it is anything but easy. And in moments, it is terrifying, as the worse of the trauma is emotionally relived in steps, until it is all relived. I told the clinical social worker after the meeting yesterday, I once was married to a clinical social worker and learned a lot from her. I did not say, after she was done teaching me what she knew, the angels taught me a good bit more, and they used me as their patient teaching model.

Sloan

keysmyhome@hotmail.com

After putting up the post, received this:

From: keyscoalition@live.com
To: keysmyhome@hotmail.com
Subject: Hi
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 07:21:37 -0700

on the beach

Yesterday, I put up a new page at goodmorningbirmingham.com re my brother Major’s death in March 2010:

Major Bashinsky – Legal Schnauzer v. Bash, Jefferson County Coroner and Birmingham Police Department

But not without plenty of struggle.

I felt my dreams said I should create that page, which I did. Then, I had terrible dreams and removed it. Then, I had dreams causing me to think I should put it up again, which I did. Then, I had awful dreams and took it down again. Then, I had more dreams causing me to to think I should put it up again, which I did. The ordeal took three days, I felt poisoned the whole time, and was terrified. Terrified to leave it up, terrified not to leave it up. My dreams last night were easier, very old business being put to bed.

I told Sandy Downs, who ran for sheriff down here in 2008, all the while I was writing into the Rutgers gay hate crime conviction, I was writing privately to a blogger in Birmingham, Legal Schnauzer, who keeps publishing articles challenging the coroner and police’s suicide conclusion in Major’s case. Because Major was bi-sexual, which lay at the root of his suicide, I understood the Rutgers case was my cue to engage Legal Schnauzer.

Sandy said she remembered back when I first put up posts about Major going missing, she wondered why I was writing he had killed himself and had tried to make it look like someone else had done it, before his body was even found and he was confirmed dead? She said when the coroner and police finally came to the same conclusion, people were terrified of me. She said people cannot deal with someone who knows stuff no one else knows.

Sandy said, if someone had killed Major and had wanted it to look like murder and not suicide, there would have been no doubt whatsoever it was murder. To that I add, if someone had wanted to send a message to the rest of the Bashinskys, there would have been no doubt whatsoever it was murder.

It said the same thing happened after I learned from dreams I and my then two best men friends had, that I had an older half brother by my father. That led to the end of what already was my father’s and my fragile relationship and, I’m pretty sure, contributed to my daughters shutting me out of their lives.

I cannot imagine how people in Birmingham and Alabama, after learning of my view of what had happened to Major, and then learning the coroner and police department later arrived at the same conclusion, did not believe Major killed himself. There could not have been a louder AMEN from God.

Major Bashinsky – Legal Schnauzer v. Bash, Jefferson County Coroner and Birmingham Police Department comprehensively covers Major’s death, and, hopefully, is the last I ever will write about it.

That page is more representative of the kind of work I did before being sent to the Keys in late 2000, than is the Keys intrigue in which I tend to get tangled. A piece of which, perhaps as comic relief, is a recent email exchange with Deer Ed of the Coconut Telegraph of bigpinekey.com, reputed to get more traffic than any web page in the Keys, except the Sheriff’s who’s been arrested lately web page.

Hi Sloan,

You don’t think you are getting enough new visitors on your site from the link on the CT. I don’t think you realize that most people return to the CT more than once a week, thousands visit it very day! Those stats are not available on the free stat software that E uses. I used a paid version that breaks it down further than just the number of unique visitors.

I don’t think I ever mentioned this info about stats.

Ta, ta

Deer Ed

I replied:

Your higher stats on visits to my sites very well might be more realistic than what E provides. Don’t know what the stats on my sites are for quite a while.

I found myself thinking maybe yesterday, CT readers who really were interested in what I write, probably not a lot of them, came to my Keys websites after I stopped your and my arrangement; and the other CT readers didn’t really matter.

Seems really egotistical of me to pay you money so I can try to lure your readers to my sites, which take no paid ads, sell no products but a worse-selling novel which, so far, has produced maybe $25 in author’s royalties, and on which sites anything is free for the picking. While at the same time, I pay you for me to lure readers to your CT, which takes paid ads and advertises your pirate enterprise.

A few months ago, you told your readers you would never kick me off the CT, you liked my writings; you wished you had more writers like me, but didn’t see that happening. Would seem, therefore, you would give me the link over to the full goodmorning posts, which usually do not work on the CT format. Otherwise, I would send you the full posts to publish like you do From The Right. Does he pay you?

Paying you for the link to the full posts at my sites made some sense when I ran for office, but I did not run in 2010, and, so far, it does not seem I will run this year. If I have my way, I won’t run again. If I’d had my way, I would not have run the last five times, and most likely youse and mese would not have met and I would not have published anything on the CT, and maybe I wouldn’t have any websites.

The raving raven stalked me to goodmorningfloridakeys.com after I left the CT. I published a few of his and my back and forths in the comments section of that site. Then, I told him no mas until he provided his human name and proved it was him. I told him that I fixed it so all his comments at gmfk.com went into spam, where I would not read them, and if he emailed me and the email did not begin with his human name, I would not read it. Nothing more from him, so far.

That’s the other problem. I cannot financially support a site which encourages anonymous attacks on other people, which the CT does.

If you wish, treat this as a comment from Sloan to the CT.

Sloan

keysmyhome@hotmail.com

Distant in-law Ron responded to yesterdays the art of war – Key West strain post, which waved the same banner as today’s:

SLOAN – my favorite flag and my favorite thought….. who does this flag belong to ? The tree commish ? rk

I figure the odds of the Key West Tree Commission changing their spots without criminal prosecution are zero.

Here is the text of a Tree Commission article The People’s Special Prosecutor submitted to Key West the Newspaper, which ran in yesterday’s edition: kwth.com.

Pay up, or else

A long time ago, in a kinder gentler nation, we had a Tree Commission. It oversaw the city’s trees in the right of way, and protected them. You had to get a permit if YOU wanted to trim a city owned tree in front of your home. The Tree Commission also tried to make Key West more beautiful and sought donations to plant more native trees on city owned lands.

Then the State made rules that no more developers could come in and bulldoze Florida into a heap of ruin, and lay concrete from Panama City to Key West. The State wanted to protect the Everglades, the marshes, the salt ponds, the beaches, the mangroves, etc. The 1996 Mangrove Act started a landslide of protective measures to ensure that Florida, the only place in the US with this habitat, would not be swept away by developers.

Cities and municipalities were ordered to adopt Land Development Regulations for development projects. These developers wanting to improve lands and develop them first had to remove all invasive trees from the property they sought to develop. Then their parcel was scrutinized for habitats, wetlands, marshes, mangroves, majestic native trees, etc. These would all be protected, and only portions if any would be allowed to removed without paying exasperating costs and replanting somewhere else. Native trees were listed by the State of Florida for protection, as they grow nowhere else in the US. When these native trees reached a certain diameter, they had to be counted and listed. These trees would be counted against the developer, and would either have to be replaced or paid for. Some trees were so old and magnificent that they were not allowed to be removed at all. During the construction phase of the development these required trees had to be protected. If these magnificent existing old trees were damaged, the developer would get hauled into the city court for “tree abuse”. The maximum fine was $5000 if the damage was irreparable. If you damaged the city owned landscaping going in and out of the development area with your construction equipment, you would have to replace or replant what was damaged. Also, if any city landscape had to be removed for your roads, driveways and sidewalks, you had to pay for that too.

Everyone who owned trees on any private property were required to keep them trimmed 14 feet above streets and 8 ft.above sidewalks. Also no tree could present a safety hazard by hiding street signs, traffic signs, lights, etc. You could get fined if you didn’t manage your trees. You could also get in trouble if you allowed a diseased or infested tree to stay on your property without removing or treating it, because the threat of the disease spreading, as did the citrus canker.

For all “new” homes there were landscape requirements, so that every property would have it’s share of trees and bushes to help with noise, soil quality and stability, water runoff, etc. In other words everyone had to share a small part of keeping Florida green. For single family homes, the minimum requirement is a tree and a few bushes. The city can’t make you have more than their minimum requirements, though they encourage it!

Now in some way off world where only criminals live, a person thought to use the Planning and Development rules for developers, against existing private little homeowners that had zealously planted because the City encouraged it! They had no idea the City would then start charging them a fee to trim their own trees or remove one if they had overplanted. These homeowners had more than their share of landscaping, yet in some secret meeting the City decided there was a lot of trees they could make money off of since the developments had slowed to a halt. So the City began requiring tree protection of every incidental shrub or tree on every existing property of a private homeowner in Key West. There were no NEW rules, the City just started using the ones for development projects the likes of Truman Annex, and unlawfully applied these rules to Ma and Pa on Elm Street. Kind of like applying the seat belt law to joggers.

Tree protection became mandatory for every tree that was not an invasive tree. Meaning, you can’t touch it. If the homeowner attempted to trim a tree off the sidewalk or signs, they would haul that homeowner in and accuse him of tree abuse. They made up a fee of $150.00 per inch, though you will NEVER find that in writing anywhere…. and charged that to both the person who owned the tree and the person who trimmed it. All the trees the city encouraged you to plant would now cost you $150.00 an inch to maintain!! But it is nowhere in writing. It is a secret you learn at a Tree Commission hearing if you are applying for a permit or hauled in on a violation for taking care of your own yard and trees. A tree might cost you $6000 or so to remove, and $2000 or so to trim. Or the City might try to make an example of you as they did with the City Commissioner Merili McCoy who drafted and signed into existence the land development regulations. They fined her $5000 for trimming her trees 10 days before she died. She told them she was ashamed of them all, and that is not what the rules were intended for. Or you might be treated like Radim Havlicek who they made an example of for both taking the “local” boys job, and having the nerve to trim up the trees so the church could avoid more lawsuits from the kids climbing in the trees and falling. They fined him $105,000.00 for making a church’s trees safe and clearing the lower canopy to comply with the 14 feet requirement. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the tree looks or how much care the arborist who trimmed it gave when he trimmed. If you DARE avoid paying the extortion rate of $150.00 an inch to the City of Key West, you will be punished.!

The Citizen called the Tree Commission a War Crimes Tribunal in their editorial about Radim’s case. Well, my friends, no longer!!! There no longer is a War Crimes Tribunal, they NOW just march you straight into the gas chambers. War Crimes Tribunal was in the “kinder, gentler days.” Of course what they are doing is unlawful, illegal, corrupt, and intentional. The City doesn’t care. They are making money hand over fist. But there is a problem…….

The State only allowed the city and municipalities to adopt rules for permits, and the cities and municipalities could only charge the administrative fees for the permits: the cost of staff and paper….say $40 or so. What would the city do with all this money, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, maybe more they are making off of permits? What about making the checks payable to the City of Key West, and then the money can be put in different locations? Or what about instructing the person to mark it as a donation, which they were authorized to accept? Or what about just stuffing the cash in our pockets?

Hallelujah, Laundering begins!!!

Oh Boo Hoo, the Tree Commission was faced with a couple of problems where they couldn’t find a developer rule to apply in order to get a fine out of a person.

So they just began to make up rules! Rules like: you can’t trim a limb that is over 3 1/2 inches without a permit (which costs $150 per inch). They printed this front page of the local newspaper; so all plagued with white flies, would run in and apply for a permit. The unsuspecting person would then find out the permit fee is not an administrative fee like they expected and is legally allowed….instead the cost to trim infested white fly trees is $150.00 an inch. Again, that amount is not in writing. It is a secret you find out when you either are hauled in for trimming your own trees, or when you apply for a permit. These illegal fines are also eliminated from their book keeping records, so are the permit fees. The City records show only a few payors per year, instead of the hundreds and hundreds. 80% of the accounting is missing the names of the payor, so there is no way to verify the city records….and all the missing names probably went through a shredder anyway. The City posts up fines like $7.50, fines with missing names, and the payors are listed under “Vendors”. I can’t make this up, this is what they gave to a newspaper reporter with the Keynoter.

The City coffers were overflowing! But the Tree Commission got a little overzealous in one Hearing and the Assistant City Attorney went rabid mad and demanded the tree commissioners start counting dead limbs too!!!!! He said they were shortchanging themselves and could be making more money if they charged for dead limbs too,…and then further instructed the Tree Commissioners..”Don’t differentiate BETWEEN the live and dead limbs anymore!”.

Well, people just stopped and stared. They didn’t know how all this happened. Nobody seemed to be paying much attention to the Tree Commission, where unsuspecting citizens thought there sat a bunch of gardeners wearing their gloves and bonnets, or caps. The citizens envisioned them planting little seedlings within the city parks and public areas. What a perfect place to hide a criminal enterprise, a sweet little Tree Commission!!!!

Kind of like putting money in the cookie jar…or better yet, arsenic in mother’s milk.

Well, the City destroyed or has hidden the record of the hearing where the Assistant City Attorney went rabid mad…probably because he would be disbarred at the least. And the Chair of the Tree Commission, Neils Weise, who so gloriously invented the 3 1/2 inch rule to gouge homeowners sits proudly as the Chair still demanding your money at every hearing. The City refuses to rein them in and now the City Attorney Sean Smith is “working on something” while the City Commissioners sit idly by and wait to see if what Sean is working on will get them off the hook for their “enterprise” that the State Attorney is looking into.

If you have EVER paid money to the Tree Commission, an attorney wants to hear from you…. e-mail me at
janesjunglework@gmail.com

–
Sandy Downs

Distant North Carolina in-law Ron responded to yesterday’s system jump – Florida Keys schools post: 

SLOAN – interesting…… we would have to conclude that the KW Tree Commish is a living organism…… perhaps a predatory ameba ???

ciao, ron

I replied: Precisely.

When Ron’s grandson married my oldest first Bashinsky cousin’s daughter, which was around when Ron got on my email hit list and started receiving my daily ravings, he had fond memories of Key West from many vacations he and his wife took there while she was alive. Lengthy vacations. Today, I get the sense Ron’s fond memories are a bit crowded back by my pechant to spend a great deal of time in the city’s sewers and report what I find there …

Demosthenes responded to day before yesterday’s Rutgers gay hate crime post fallout …post …

 Excellent post, Mr. Bashinsg, and a very insightful look at what I believe to be American Christianity’s true savior. It’s very true, and historians and forensic psychologists are beginning to agree that Paul was, if not a closet homosexual, at the very least extremely mysogenistic. His diatribes against both homosexuality and women were never once verbally backed up by Jesus himself, and put to mind a quote from Shakespeare: Me thinkest thou doth protest too much.

I should backtrack a second and reword an earlier statement. I shouldn’t have said Paul was American Christianity’s savior, but the savior of the loud, screechy, far-right-wing brand of American Christianity. Just thought I should clarify, as I DO know there are plenty of American Christians out there who actually follow the teachings of Christ.

D

That was supposed to read Mr. Bashinski, but autocorrect apparently got me again. Apologies. D.

I replied:

Bashinsky, i is Christian ending in Polish, y is Jewish, or so I was told by family historians, who, like me, were raised in the Christian church, as the result of our common Polish ancestor and his Southern Baptist wife agreeing it would be easier on their children to be raised Christian in Troy, Alabama, where that ancestor’s brother was the only other Jew in residence. Those two men were the only in that bloodline not wiped out by the Nazis. You can read about Leopold in A Few Remarkable People I Have Known, which is a page in the right-hand menu at goodmorningbirmingham.com. You also can read there about five other people who seriously influenced me – eventually.

The black woman who raised me, whose black father was raised on a southern plantation before the War Between the States, was as close to following Jesus as I imagine anyone could get. I wrote about her in A Few Remarkable People I Have Known, which is a page at goodmorningbirmingham.com. The man whose portrait leads off that little book was the most godly man I ever knew, and he didn’t even attend church. Far as I know, he wasn’t even a Christian. 

I wrote about four other people in that little book, who I am pretty sure stood very high before God. Three those four were Christians, the other was a Jew, my great-grandfather from Poland. Those six were the people God arranged to plant seeds in me, which later (much later) were ready to germinate, sprout and grow. I imagine anyone reading those six portraits will see in them bits and pieces of my own personality today, although some parts of me seem to have come from another planet entirely.

Demosthenes also replied to yesterday’s system jump – Florida Keys schools post …

I agree, Sloan, that KWHS in particular, and MCSD in general, need a system jump. I happen to know your Coastie friend and his wife, and I’ve talked to them at length about issues within the school system here. I’ve come up with an interesting theory, that I’d like to share with you now.

I don’t think MCSD WANTS their students, especially their foreign students, to succeed. If the students succeed academically, then they will very likely do one of two things: either leave the Keys entirely, or become locally powerful business men and women who will upset the delicate house of cards the local powerhouses have built for themselves.

Yes, the kids leaving would definitely be preferable to them upsetting the balance, but if we keep them here AND uneducated, we will have a nearly limitless supply of menial labor work force. We NEED undereducated people to clean our hotels and bus our dishes and work the cash registers at the seemingly thousands of t-shirt and souvenir shops on Duval Street. On top of that, let’s also overinflate the cost of living down here so that in order to even keep a roof over their heads and groceries on the table, they will have to work two and three of these menial labor jobs. Between these philosophies, these people will never have either the time or the money to pull themselves up out of the daily drudgery, and realize the one thing we don’t want them to realize: THEY CAN LEAVE!!!

I call this philosophy “plantation mentality”, as it directly mirrors the mentality of the Southern aristocrats immediately before, during, and after the Civil War, AND during Reconstruction. I’m sure there are some flaws in the theory, such as the generalization that everyone in the service industry is undereducated, but I’m pretty sure this theory is closer to the mark than Key West and Monroe County would care to admit.
D

I replied:

It is true, the Key West City government and businesses like to have cheap labor down here, but I don’t think all that much of it is done by local kids. Lots of East European and West European, Mexican and Central American laborers in and near Key West. Lots of mainland American immigrant laborers in and near Key West, who came down to try to get a taste of what was billed as paradise, or to try to escape something they didn’t like or didn’t like them. What irks me about the school curriculum is most local kids are not graduating from high school with a skill that can earn them a decent wage. What also irks me is the schools are teaching college prep all the way down into grammar school, even though half the kids will never go to college, and of the half who do, maybe one-fifth will graduate. What else irks me is the schools are teaching to the FCAT, instead of to the children, each of whom are unique and instruction tailored to their uniqueness. Good teachers know this, and teach each of their students differently. Alas, the modern education system pushes teachers to teach like robots, kids are taught as if one size fits all. Yes, there are advanced classes for kids who are gifted, super-motivated, who do not succumb to being bored to death to the point they skip class, drop out of school altogether. I understand all of that is not much of a problem for charter schools, but it is a big problem in the rest of the schools. I wrote a lot about that a few months back. Ciao

Also heard from Coast Guardsman Brian Wise:

Howdy again, Sloan!

Hope the day finds you well!

First off, I wanted to say that everything I wrote to you about the nature of God and our position in relation to Him/Her/It is my own personal opinion, based on my own observations throughout my lifetime, and in no way was meant to be a judgment against you or your personal belief system. I have no right or desire to judge others’ beliefs; that’s a responsibility reserved for God and God alone, and I truly want no part of it.

Since these emails have been going to print (with my permission, of course), I should also perform a little CYA on my own rantings, and say that my opinions in these emails are my own personal opinions, and are not to be taken in any way as representative of the opinions or official policies of the US Coast Guard, the Department of Homeland Security, their affiliates, or any other government entity.

Now that the legalese is out of the way, I just wanted to say that perhaps we both ARE looking at two different facets of God, and believe me, I know He/She/It has MULTIPLE facets. I really can’t say for certain, because I’ve yet to walk a mile in your shoes, and truthfully, my life has been more or less easy up to the writing of this email. I have an awesome career, an amazing wife, the most wonderful children. I am, in every sense of the word, blessed. Although I DO recognize my own part in the decisions I’ve made and the work I’ve put in to have such a life, I also recognize the hand of God, Fate, Kismet, Luck, or whatever else you want to call it, in shaping me and my life, and I am both humbled and awed by it. But I can’t really bring myself to believe in a god that needs or wants to be feared, nor do I believe such a god would be deserving of worship or devotion. But that’s just me.

I should also speak to you on the subject of bravery. I know you keep referring to Michelle and I as a brave couple. While I thank you for that and appreciate it, I can’t really agree with it. As I’ve said before, there’s very little that the local Establishment can do to either Michelle or I. Yes, the MCSD could retaliate against Michelle, but as I’ve said before, she can just terminate her employment with them at any time. It occurred to me that they could start pestering the local Coast Guard command to do something about my mouth, but once my disclaimer is publicly posted, there’s nothing that can be done on that front, either. I’m, as an American citizen, still within my right to voice my opinion in any public forum, as long as I either a) disguise my affiliation with the Coast Guard, or b) make a statement similar to the one above, thereby disavowing the Coast Guard of any involvement. They can’t try to run me out of business, and they can’t attack Michelle or I at home, since they have no access to it, and that pretty much disarms them for me with the possible exception of really harsh words.

Based on their inability to effectively retaliate the only way they know how, I can’t really consider myself a brave person, as I’m not really vulnerable to them. I’ve studied Sun Tzu, and although I haven’t tried to purposely use his teachings, they’ve apparently rubbed off on my subconscious, as I unwittingly ensconced myself within an impenetrable fortress, at least as far as they’re concerned, and can comfortably “wage war”, figuratively speaking, against them without fear of reprisal. It could actually be said that my writings are an act of cowardice, but I prefer to view them as acts of extreme strategic superiority. You, and your readers, may view them as you will.

I had a discussion with Michelle about why I’m doing this. Her opinion is that the Key West oligarchy isn’t worth the energy to exact my revenge. I completely agree with her, so I’m not doing it for that reason. I’m doing it because I strongly believe that EVERYONE deserves the opportunity to better their lives, and in taking that opportunity, edifies everyone in the community, and the community itself as a whole. That, and I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution of the US, and to protect the people from all enemies, foreign AND domestic, and I take that oath very seriously.

So here I sit, plinking away at the enemy’s castle, hoping that my cowardly shots will one day allow someone, who couldn’t otherwise defend themselves from the local corruption, to rise above it.

Yours,

Brian Wise

Hi, Brian.

I read to Sandy Downs this part of your email:

“They can’t try to run me out of business, and they can’t attack Michelle or I at home, since they have no access to it, and that pretty much disarms them for me with the possible exception of really harsh words. Based on their inability to effectively retaliate the only way they know how, I can’t really consider myself a brave person, as I’m not really vulnerable to them.”

I told Sandy it doesn’t look like Brian and Michelle have lived in the Keys very long. Sandy agreed, laughed, said, “He still thinks the Keys are part of the US! You can tell him I said that.”

Sandy could tell you lots of things about what they can do, of which neither of us have published anything lately. The Tree Commission and their Nazi relatives in City Hall are pussies compared to the goons Sandy would need maybe three hours of your time to tell you about.

They easily can get at you and Michelle. They are capable of anything. That’s why people don’t want to come forward and blow the whistle down here. That’s why there are not many more like you and Michelle in the lower Keys. It’s very dangerous to blow the whistle down here.

My opinion. They are as bad as, or worse than the bad people you search for and apprehend at sea on Coast Guard missions. They are as bad as, or worse than the bad people you found and apprehended during your military service, to which you alluded the other day.

I often wonder why they have not disappeared me, since they know where I live, and they know it would be easy to take me out. Perhaps my telling them in posts that nothing would make me happier than to be bumped off serves as a deterrent. Perhaps they want people to keep thinking I’m crazy and not worth listening to, and if they disappear me, people will wonder why they got rid of me, if I was crazy and not worth listening to?

Remembering an Old Testament passage, I said fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and until the fear of God is experienced, there is no way to understand or appreciate it. I fear myself even more than I fear God. I fear myself not doing God’s will for me.

Although I know of Sun Tzu, I was taught the art of war in me – the many beams in my own eye, the many parts of me who do not want to surrender their will to God’s will. The external wars into which I am put are pussies compared to my internal wars. Might have something to do with why I have felt poisoned for two days now. 

When I describe God, it is from personal, felt experience.

You are indeed blessed, Brian. I hope some day to feel the way you do about life and God.

Sloan

keysmyhome@hotmail.com