TREE LAW!

In Case You Are Unaware

Trees are - you may be conscious of this already - large living entities in the neighbourhood, whom have been around for decades and form part of the architecture and landscape.  Pay attention to the 'decades' part of this sentence.  Art!

     Bear in mind that a mature tree, of whatever species, takes decades to reach maturity, even if it is left alone in the grounds of said possessor.  This is where Tree Law comes into being, because an item you may have been used to as a background object turns out to be worth $1,000,000.  Ooops.

     ANYWAY what we have here today is an hideous combination of MalCom and Tree Law.  The Unfortunate Narrator, hereafter TUN, lived next door to a woman who was the walking, talking definition of a 'Karen' and whom was also the Home Owners Association president.  Since HOAs are passing rare in The Allotment Of Eden, allow me to explicate: they are associations of home owners with a handbook of rules and regulations, usually monitored and enforced by little tin Hitlers who abuse their powers for enrichment and malice.  There must be good HOAs out there, except you just don't hear of them.  Art!

"Evil HOA" because pollution?

     To quote TUN, " - she seemed to have some vendetta against trees" in addition to being a complete bottomhole.  Not a semi-bottomhole or a partial bottomhole, a complete bottomhole, who used her HOA position and authority to fine anyone with trees and force them to get rid of.  Traumatised by watching 'The Evil Dead', one presumes.  Art!

     ANYWAY Karen hated a large tree that TUN had in his garden, claiming that it blocked the sun at midnight and imperilled power lines, neither of which was true.  Eventually she got the HOA to send TUN a letter imposing a fine on his tree because it might fall down and damage Karen's house, in the same way that the Earth might fly out of it's orbit and into the Sun.  'Possible' is not 'probable'.  TUN told Karen this face to face when next they met, which apparently silently enraged her, because THE TREE MUST DIE!

     So, she forged HOA paperwork, then engaged a tree cutting service, using the fraudulent papers to cite TUN's tree being removed.    So, TUN came home one day to - no tree, and a smugly smiling Karen.  Art!

     TUN did not take this lying down, and intended to get legal redress.  He found out, much to his surprise, that there are indeed lawyers who specialise in Tree Law " - which I didn't even know was a thing".  O TUN you sweet summer child you.  His first step was to consult an arborist and work out how much his tree was worth, with the irritating absence of ever mentioning what species of tree it was.  Whichever, the timber was used a lot in furniture manufacture and would have been worth $75,000, another reminder that Tree Law is EXPENSIVE.

     Karen, being in the same position as TUN and knot knowing anything about trees, assumed that he was either bonkers or had misplaced a decimal point, and offered to reduce his HOA fines by $100 if he dropped the case.  Karen also expected TUN to pay the tree cutting service's fees, which he must have had a good laugh at.

     SHOCKER! he did not drop the case.

     SURPRISE! he won the case, thanks to his having detailed reports from an arborist, and all Karen had were fraudulent documents.  Art!

Ooops

     TUN's lawyer then reached out to various environmental groups in the state, as well as the state's District Attorney office, about the HOA breaching state tree laws - yes, there are such things.  Suddenly the HOA was the focus of an investigation and another lawsuit, because healthy trees needed an inspection and state permission before they could be removed.  Which had never happened.

     Ooops.

     The HOA tried to resolve things by throwing Karen under the bus, by firing her.  This didn't work as all the actions she carried out had their approval, so all the homeowners who'd had trees removed came after them for restitution.  The state imposed numerous fines, to the extent that the HOA went bust and dissolved itself.

     TUN still has Karen as a neighbour, but she now has no standing, power or influence.  No word on whether TUN intends to buy a replacement tree or not.

     And that, gentle reader, is the power of TREE LAW!

     

Abramoff The Charts

You may recall the murky details of the 'Blue Horizon' gambling cruise ships, which we here at BOOJUM! did as an Intro several weeks back.  Two of the primary players, Abramoff and Kidan, were extremely corrupt and criminal.  Today I'll add in a bit of detail about Jack Abramoff.  Art!

Back when he had a reputation

     Rather than running a gambling cruise operation, Abramoff's day job was as a lobbyist in Washington, which translates into English as a person paid to bribe, corrupt and pander to politicians on behalf of their clients.  The clients in Abramoff's case were Native American tribes, whom were trying to get gambling concessions on their reservations.  Along with another three lobbyists, Abramoff swindled $85 million out of their clients, grossly overcharging them and even conspiring to work against them in secret, thus to force them to utilise said lobbyists.  The quartet of crooks were ordered to repay $25 million they had overcharged, and Abramoff took a plea deal in 2006, admitting guilt in conspiracy, fraud and tax evasion.  He owed the IRS $1.7 million in taxes after this judgement: no details available on whether he paid it or not, but one suspects the IRS, with their laser focus and bulldog grip, would not allow him to default.

     He went to prison in 2006 and was released in 2010.  Art!

Abramoff to prison

Here's One I Prepared Earlier

Art!

     Yes.

Okay, In More Depth

The Teuton Panzer 1, 2, 3 and 4 were all pre-Second Unpleasantness designs, meaning that they had years of development to iron out any faults or defects.  The Tiger, King Tiger and Panther were all developed in wartime and, thanks to Herr Schikelgruber being a frantic interventionist, were rushed into production far too quickly.  They were all underpowered, leading to serious reliability issues; they all had complicated interleaved suspension systems, which were vulnerable to mud, snow, ice and rocks; they were tricky to operate without lots of practice; they were very difficult to maintain or repair; they had overhanging barrels that would be blocked by close terrain; their large calibre guns meant they carried far fewer shells thanks to their size; they were big, meaning harder to hide, easier to spot and easier to hit.  Art!

     This, gentle reader, it the humble Sturmgeschutz III, a self-propelled gun based on the chassis of the Panzer III.  Not at all sophisticated, it was the Teuton's most effective tank-killer, rather than their over-engineered 'big cats', so we can only be grateful that they wasted so much time and resources on the latter.

What Were They Thinking?

Were they thinking at all?  Art!

     I will not comment, except to say that South Canadian English and Proper English As What Is Spoke here are two very different creatures.

     This is Dasani Water, a brand of bottled water hoiked by the Coca Cola corporation, big in South Canada but unknown here in the Allotment Of Eden.  For their 2004 launch, CC spent $7 million in advertising, only to commit the blunder you see above.  Not only that, their highly touted 'sophisticated filtration process' utilised British tap water, just priced 500 times normal.  Plus, their 'sophisticated filtration process' failed completely, resulting in bromate contamination of Dasani.  Coca Cola were forced to recall 500,000 bottles and then ditched Dasani Water completely.  Which is why it is a stranger to supermarket shelves here in Perfidious Albion.

Finally -

Goodbye!