The view from the Tashmoo overlook, one of the great vistas of Martha’s Vineyard, has been restored, after the owners of a number of large trees finally bowed to pressure from the town of Tisbury and allowed the chainsaws in yesterday.
The removal of several of the largest trees, whose growth was gradually obliterating the view across Lake Tashmoo and Vineyard Sound, may end years of dispute between the town and Thomas and Ginny Payette of Tashmoo Farm.
Thirty-five years ago, at the end of the Viet Nam war, there was a mass evacuation of Vietnamese orphans who had been adopted by Americans and other nationalities. One of the parents anxiously waiting for news of Operation Babylift was one William Delahunt.
It was a nerve-racking time. Mr. Delahunt thought his new adopted daughter was on the first flight out. Then he learned the first flight crashed.
But despair turned to joy. She was safe on the second flight. And so the Delahunts gained a daughter, Kara Mai.
Okay, so maybe what the residents of Cuttyhunk were doing in order to get their high-speed Internet service was not strictly legal, but goodness, it was clever. It showed, they will tell you, the sort of inventiveness that made America great.
But Comcast doesn’t see it that way. To the giant telecommunications company, what the Cuttyhunkers did was theft, pure and simple. And so they have pulled the plug on the islanders, casting them back into the dark ages, online-communications-wise.
Think of humanity as a herd of caribou living on an arctic island with no predators and abundant sustenance. We reproduce wildly until inevitably the sustenance, the energy source, is overtaxed and collapses.
Then we begin to die. In the case of humanity, billions of us.
The analogy and the dark prophecy are Mike Ruppert’s. And he argues it already has begun, this great dying, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.
Martha’s Vineyard’s Indian tribe rejected a $1 million inducement to drop its objections to the proposed Cape Wind development in Nantucket Sound, in the interest of preserving a cultural tradition which some tribal members deny even exists.
The offer from Cape Wind was made during a series of meetings convened by U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in Washington in January this year. Both the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), and the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe were offered $1 million each, to be paid in installments over 20 years.
If you call the office of the Island Affordable Housing Fund these days, you don’t get a secretary answering. You get Ewell Hopkins himself, executive director, chief cook and bottle washer.
“That’s what I am. Absolutely,” said Mr. Hopkins yesterday. “I’ve laid off the entire staff. I am a staff of one.”
