The flood continues — LBAM e-mails keep blazing
Jan 6, 2009 10:39 AM,
By Harry Cline
Farm Press Editorial Staff
I seem to have offended previous writers and several new ones with my comments about those who oppose the light brown apple moth (LBAM) eradication effort.
“Perhaps you might want to reconsider how you are spending your days. Is the money worth it? I know it seems that way to most drug pushers ... until one of their own is killed on a street corner. You will have the choice to make about continuing to be flippant, and making misleading statements, or deciding to come clean and tell the people you love that you are sorry for your life’s work now that you see the results of it, them on their deathbeds.”
Maxina Ventura – San Leandro, Calif.
Maxina wrote earlier. I responded. She detailed a litany of symptoms after a bag of pheromone ties and LBAM traps were displayed at a public meeting hosted by CDFA: scratchy throat, brain fog and fragmented thinking, a debilitating headache, nausea, tingling, a feeling of pins and needles in my fingers, in my feet and leg, and elevated blood pressure.
Wow Harry,
You just refuse to learn. How can you go through life unwilling or unable to learn anything new? You have just thoroughly unmasked your ignorance about the very real harm of pesticides and you refuse to see it any other way. Good luck, Harry, but you calling the people of the Central Coast ignorant is laughable, especially in light of what you don’t know.
M A Gaskins
It is a difficult concept for many people, like yourself, to understand that a government would spray untested chemicals over a human population without knowing any potential unintended consequences. But that is what sadly happened.
Patricia Kirkaldie – Freemont, Calif.
Kirkaldie and her husband live in the Fremont area. Their daughter attends UC Santa Cruz. She is seeking a transfer to another UC campus due to health concerns related to LBAM pheromone treatments. We exchanged e-mails and her final offering was:
Could the state of California and its communities withstand the economic loss in tourism, property taxes, and businesses with 10-plus million people in the greater San Francisco Bay area moving and not visiting so LBAM chemicals can be aerial sprayed on a moth that has done no plant and/or crop damage?
And my favorite:
dear whoever the h___ you are,
now you’re messing with a californian formerly from new york. There’s nothing rational about spraying people with poison. california is in peril because a______s like you and the cdfa want to poison people for money. i hope your inbox explodes and you go up in flames with it.
have a nice day! – loonie from California
Maybe if “loonie” lives in California a little longer and before I go up in flames, he can find the shift key on the keyboard.
Maybe not too many, but I do have my group of defenders. This is my favorite from the ‘other side versus the dark side.’
Re: Your editorial of Dec. 6, “. . . California is in far more peril from ignorance than LBAM.”
Truer words were never printed. As Fred Allen once said, paraphrasing H. L. Mencken, “Nobody’s ever gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Public.”
Larry L. Strand – Sacramento, Calif.
email: hlcine@farmpress.com
New Course
New Course
