Kent Whealy's Letter to SSE Members

[kctomato]

canadamike said:

The forefathers of your great country were no idiots. Their wiseness and love of participative democracy paid off handsomely.

unless of course you were an Native American or slave



I must say I don't like this! This is becoming less randy and more corporate lawyer like at every moment!

It's cold out. There's no mock terror threats to scare us. The politicans all suck and the pundits are worse. Britney is beyond boring and approaching ANS lunacy. I sure was hoping for something a little more scandalous.

You know like some kind of Penthouse-letters-meets-Carrie-Bradshaw-New-Yorker-gone-Sex in the Silo thing involving love triangles and lesbain lust all stemming from a campout night of excessive Grandpa Ott's morning glory seed ingestion and an inappropriate exclaimation of "I milking the cows baby!" leading to a spiraling fit of jealousy, greed, and power plays.

All followed up with the inevitable posting of John-like revelations when the great Queen Bee of the abyssmal fermentation emerges exclaiming "I know. I introduced them. Glory be to me" followed by a plague of fruit flies emerging from the maggots of the abyss proclaiming "me too! me too".

Yes that would be far more interesting

[lavandulagirl]

I noticed that the SSE forums have announced that posts to their site will not appear until after they have been okayed by the mods, due to abuse of the forum. I guess the whole situation has really sparked some attention from the membership. I'm thinking the corporate front is not serving them well. What do you guys think? Is someone on the board going to have to fall on their sword in order for this to go away?

[jtcm05]

kctomato said:

canadamike said:

The forefathers of your great country were no idiots. Their wiseness and love of participative democracy paid off handsomely.

unless of course you were an Native American or slave

HAHA!!



Omg, what a joke that forum has become in only a matter of weeks. Almost as bad as tomatoville.


almost...

[Alan]

Well I'm sure that Diane Whealy really thought her letter was going to do some more "damage control" but just like the boards "cover our but" letter it reads transparently, vapidly, and still leaves an empty feeling in the pit of my stomache and I'm sure in the pit of many others stomache.

Once again the agenda comes across that no wrong or harm has been done to Kent Whealy or the name and agenda of the SSE because a co-founder, who also apparently let this happen without question, issues a letter.

You might notice that once again there are no facts and figures in this letter, at least not like there were in Kent Whealey letter where statements were made and then backed up with facts and figures, Diane probably should of thought about that a bit before firing off a very contrived letter about the "wrongness" and "inacuracy" of Kents letter. If he is so inacurate and wrong, where indeed are the facts and figures to back up these accusations, no where to be found from what I have seen.

You'll also notice that she takes plenty of time to cover the board members and back them up, particularly Amy Goldman. What does Amy have to hide that she can't come out herself and provide facts and figures to prove to us her point of view.

If nothing else as I have said before the board has to answer and back up with facts their reason for terminating Kents employment as well as allowing board members with a conflict of interest to serve on the board. If nothing else it sure does appear, even if Kent did have a helping hand in it, that Mrs. Goldman has made a pretty penny of the hard work off the SSE and the resources funded by and backed up by the membership.


Simply put, if the SSE didn't have something to be hiding right now, there would be discussion of this on their message board, but as things stand right now they are doing damage controll and discussion will not be tolerated, I hope they realize there are a ton of garden related forums all over the net where this very discussion is hapening.

I posted my point for point rebuttal of their response to their forum and was promptly banned from the forum. I hope they realize how upset their membership is and that no one is going to back down any time soon and shouldn't back down until some solid answers and responsibility and compensation is replaced where it properly belongs.

I may sound like chicken little but the truth is that this sets up a dangerous precident for the future of SSE and could allow all manner of things to be allowed and tolerated in the name of the SSE, the worst of which could be some nice kickbacks from big ag industry to provide resources to them in exhange for some moral blindness on behalf of the board since members no longer have a say in the goings on.

And what's so scary about that you ask?

umm, well maybe the fact that with the exception of Native seeds/SEARCH and a few other independent places as well as home seed savers our nation does not have an official seed bank. The ARS GRIN system is about as corporate and useless to the gardener as you could ever imagine and I am currently working my hardest to extract all the usefull material from those sites as I can and get them into the hands of experienced gardeners to deciminate world wide. GRIN is also underfunded and not very well taken care of and are also failing in their supposed agenda to protect the genetic diversity of our food crops because they don't poperly take care of their resources or allow the general public to request from them any more.

And what regulations are there and big corporate agriculture and working with them on behalf of the government? None, because our government thinks such things, much like small farms and seed banks are petty and a waste of money and space.

As you can see the danger in this lapse of Morals and agenda on behalf of the SSE is quite scary and could lead us down some very bad roads in the future. On other sites I have seen employees from SSE say they would never do anything to harm the integrity or the goals of SSE, well guess what dear employees, I doubt highly that Kent Whelley would have either and you guys and your precious board of directors not only pulled the rug out from under him but also robbed him of everything that he ever worked for, so what makes you think your above the Coup De tat that is going on in Iowa dear SSE employees?

Do you think that for a second that folks like Rob Johnston and Amy Goldman don't have conflicts of interest in all this? Whats next is Martha Stewar going to set on the board and claim that she has the knowledge and background to back all of this up. How about your precious Carolyn Male who is evidently, from what I have seen of her opinion, all for the change.

SSE has lost all sense of direction and not because of Kent, they can't even argue that. The twin valleys and ancient white cattle campaign as well as the restoration of buildings and trails was voted on and decided upon or talked about as early as the late 80's and as late as 1993 and you guys are reniging on it now and claiming that it isn't part of SSE's mission?

That's ridiculous.

Think twice before you issue letters full of rhetoric and character assasination SSE it only looks bad on you along with censoring discussion of such events.

This karma will come back on you, trust me on that, things will be set right because there are gardeners and SSE members all over the world who will not stand for this.

I suggest that everyone take the time and really nail the board members of SSE with your thoughts and also nail the message board, the more of a thorn in their side you are the more they will have to notice, if they block your ISP just look up Proxy servers on the net and get to them that way.

Just me and my $0.02 again.

[lavandulagirl]

Alan - did you post the rebuttal you have here on page 4? Banned, huh? You rebel you...

[PapaVic]

" ... you guys and your precious board of directors not only pulled the rug out from under (Ken Ettlinger?) but also robbed him of everything that he ever worked for ..."

Am I reading that correctly? Are you saying that someone at SSE robbed Ken Ettlinger at Long Island Seed Project of something he worked for? Or are you talking about Kent Whealey? I'm confused.

Bill

Alan, I was taking that quote from the middle of your paragraph that reads verbatim:

"As you can see the danger in this lapse of Morals and agenda on behalf of the SSE is quite scary and could lead us down some very bad roads in the future. On other sites I have seen employees from SSE say they would never do anything to harm the integrity or the goals of SSE, well guess what dear employees, I doubt highly that Ken Ettling would have either and you guys and your precious board of directors not only pulled the rug out from under him but also robbed him of everything that he ever worked for, so what makes you think your above the Coup De tat that is going on in Iowa dear SSE employees?"

[Alan]

my bad, to many things on my mind at once, will got back and edit that. I had been reading over at LIseed before posting this and obviously my mind was wondering.

Thanks for the correction.

[PapaVic]

Alan,

I wasn't correcting you. I was like SHOCKED all of a sudden, thinking that Ken Ettlinger somehow had been burned in all of this. Thank goodness he's totally not affected by this whole debacle.

Bill

[jaliranchr]

mischka said:

I was posting them out of courtesy to the members here, nothing more. I don't own or operate SSE nor did I have anything to do with recent events.

Honestly Markhawk, your continued petty behavior toward me here only makes you look more of a fool.

Delete my posts if you want, Alan. I'm done playing nice.

Oh, please, when did you ever play "nice." You have played to get your way, but you have never played "nice." sheesh

[MawkHawk]

mischka said:

I was posting them out of courtesy to the members here, nothing more. I don't own or operate SSE nor did I have anything to do with recent events.

Honestly Markhawk, your continued petty behavior toward me here only makes you look more of a fool.

Delete my posts if you want, Alan. I'm done playing nice.

Dunt

Dunt

DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Somebody needs nap.....

Sure, buddy. I'll let the other members decide who is the fool and who is not....

[flowerpower]

I really felt bad for Kent after reading his letter. These are people he thought were his friends. A really sad situation.

There are what, 1000's of listed SSE members? Thats alot of cash flow just on membership fees. I think the paying members should have a say on who is on the "Board". (Not really sure if thats possible with a non-profit). I do think SSE will lose members over this whole thing. And I wouldn't be surprised if another seed saving group starts up very soon.

Alan, I appreciate you not editing/deleting the Letters from SSE. You got banned from SSE forums? Already? What did you do now?

[Alan]

Posted the letter and my response from page four of this conversation. Completly blocked. Though interestingly enough they didn't block my IP address so re-registering was easy enough. If they block my IP i'll just use a proxy server like I did at Idig though.

Have you guys been following the thread over at gardenweb between tville and tland? It's pretty funny, plus Carolyn pretty much admited to trolling on our forum.

Hi carolyn, why don't you come play with us?

[bunkie]

good for you alan! thanks for the info on the proxy server stuff. i can't believe they won't allow a discussion about this (on the SSE forum). you'd think they'd want to know what the members are thinking...then again....as someone mentioned on another forum, there are no more members at SSE, only customers...due to the new bylaws. sucks!

[kctomato]

Alan, there have been fairly recent changes to GRIN compared to the past. I know that for tomatoes lots of good qualified people are working to update stocks and deal with purity issues. It is not the most public accessable situation but at least it hasn't been turned over solely to seed companies. You can read about the changes and the goals in minutes of the Tomato Breeders Roundtable minutes.

As for SSE, there is a private side and a public side to this.

After reading Diane's letter I am wondering about things differently. I've seen divorces where one side lashed out (and they certainly had their points) but the big picture was not getting out.

Maybe she didnt really go into specifics but that really isn't as important as the tone (to me). Divorces are messy. Private things get blurred with public ones. People say and do weird things. There is usually plenty of finger pointing to go around but in some divorces there is also someone who has some higher ground in the situation. Could be that Diane is in that position and insiders are aware of the dynamics.

Best to let time heal somethings before "taking sides". Im not "blaming" others like RJ nor choosing to boycott their companies. Time will likely tell.

But it is drama of a public organization. I am still gonna stare, chase and mock it like a white bronco.

Of course Carolyn is behind it all as the head of a power hungry secret sisterhood society of uppity NY women, who have for years attempted to rescue Diane from the plabian hillbilly out west. How and why do you think Hillary got Bill relocated to New York? ;D

[Alan]

Thanks for the viewpoint I do appreciate it greatly and theres definetly more to this story than meets the eye I am sure, the verdict indeed is still out and I'm sure will be for quite some time, the only problem is the secrecy surrounding all of the ordeal and that neither of the two SSE letters were giving facts and figures, but I agree that there is room for further discussion.

Thanks for the billary joke too, there is no way I could argue with you whatsoever on any point for the most part because it will always end with me spitting whatever liquid I am drinking at the time on the screen do to laughing at your jokes!