Stop others from cutting? Here's more

Regarding Andrew Sivetz's July 24 letter, "City should stop all the tree-cutting":

Seems like many people have things they want others to do or to have done to them. Here are a few of my wants of and for others.

The "axis of evil" would give U.S. incentives to dismantle the atomic arsenal that threatens them. For each bomb dismantled we would dilute the fissionable material to reactor grade and sell it to them for a billion dollars' incentive.

Gun owners would (as car owners are required to do) be responsible to carry insurance covering any costs of illegal harm done by their potential weapons.

Bill Sizemore would be personally evaluated by all taxpayers on the value of his initiative activities and that he be rewarded or charged according to the net value.

Faculty teaching personal finance and economics classes in state and local schools would be fined when a former student who had passed the course faces foreclosure or bankruptcy.

High school and college students would be required to work one summer in fields providing locally grown produce using their wages to support their family during that summer.

Those who would prohibit cutting big trees would be responsible to pay for their removal when it becomes a necessity to remove them because they have died or have become a safety hazard.

Arne Landsberg, Corvallis

DMV inadequate to tasks of security

I wish I were surprised at the difficulties encountered by George Stovall (editorial, July 23, "Convincing DMV of Citizenship Tough"), but I am not. The Oregon Driver and Motor Vehicles Services Division was created to enforce road laws, license drivers, etc. It has now been given the responsibility/ability to judge one's citizenship status, etc. Therein lies the rub.

The DMV is a bureaucracy and, as such, the judgments of the agency and its enforcement employees are conditioned by the need to cover its, and their own, backsides first and foremost. Hence, their first response is to punish and/or to say "no" to whatever out-of-the-ordinary issue that comes their way.

For the DMV, to "reason" is an anathema. It has demonstrated the institutional judgment of a brick on more than one occasion, and should never have been given the authority to make such judgement calls.

DMV's authority to judge such applications has crept up on us as a consequence of 9/11, and the need to have photographs and fingerprints, etc., taken as a matter of public record.

Understandable. But these are mechanical things - let us leave the photography and fingerprinting to the DMV, and the judgments to people who can competently make them without contravening common sense.

Samuel H. Clarke, Corvallis

Will volcanoes 'cap and trade,' too?

I certainly hope that the new "cap-and-trade" system announced by our governor, designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the Western states, has provisions for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions caused by volcanic activity.

Okmok, just one of Alaska's 50 active volcanoes, erupted on July 13, 2008, sending a cloud of ash and tons of greenhouse gases 35,000 feet into the air. Okmok volcano is very active, having erupted 16 times since 1805.

The "cap and trade" system is the thinking of the same group who mandated use of ethanol in our gas tanks to reduce greenhouse gases, even though making ethanol from corn requires 29 percent more energy than the ethanol fuel itself actually contains. Ethanol only contains about two-thirds as much energy as gasoline. So, while a gallon of ethanol-blended gas may cost the same as regular gasoline, it won't take you as far. In other words, to save the planet, they figured out another way to make you pay more for less.

Now, with the "cap and trade" system, they want to add a "tax" to your energy bills as the utilities and others will simply pass the cost of "buying emission credits" onto you, the consumer.

"The readiness for self-sacrifice," wrote Eric Hoffer in "The True Believer," "is contingent on an imperviousness to the realities of life. … To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible."

Warren E. Sisson Jr., Corvallis

Stop burying big nation news at back

The Gazette-Times has done it once more. Its July 25 front page has exciting articles about a new game at the Boys & Girls Club and a dead woman voting for Hillary Clinton, while the real news is on the back page of the first section. I'm speaking, of course, about Barack Obama's major speech to 200,000 cheering Germans waving American flags in Berlin.

Did they think it was a partisan story? Perhaps. We all know that John McCain would be lucky to have had an audience of 2,000 for a similar event in Berlin.

I suspect that the reason this was such a huge event for the Germans is that the German media is free to write the real news about America, rather than the pap that the corporate-

controlled news media gives us here. They know that with Barack Obama as a possible president, America may be on the verge of returning from the pit of despair that Americans would feel if they were given the real news about their country on the front page every day.

John Wolcott, Corvallis

Questions about property managers

I'm not a renter, but as I've read the recent letters from property managers and tenants, I've been wondering:

1. Are older heating fuel tanks, buried in backyards, supposed to be maintained or updated by the landlords? (i.e. have safety/environmental regulations with respect to these tanks changed over the years?)

2. If the property managers know these tanks are out of compliance, is it their responsibility to inform authorities?

3. Is it the property managers' or landlord's responsibility (or both) to provide needed structural repairs inside and outside a rental property?

4. Is there a government agency that oversees property managers?

Tim Haag, Corvallis