Letters to the Editor
Silenced
Published Letters: 1358 Editor's Choice: 75
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@Allie, genes play a big role
[Read the article: Is thyroid disease the new hysteria?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If unfermented soy wreaks havoc on the thyroid, shouldn't we see rampant thyroid problems in Japan, where they eat edamame all the time? Is there any evidence that this is the case?
I'm not saying that soy directly harms the thyroid. Remember, genes are involved. A person with an autoimmune illness usually has a bad copy of some gene involved in making antibodies.
Many autoimmune illnesses seem to occur more frequently in women of northern European descent. I suspect that Asian people are able to build a diet that includes a lot of soy for genetic reasons.
Consider this possibility: Perhaps in the last 1000 years of eating a diet based on soy, all the Asians with genes like mine have been killed off and eventually were eliminated from the Asian genome.
Everyone who couldn't tolerate soy died, and now everyone who's left produces offspring who can tolerate it just fine.
Maybe that accounts for why northern European women have autoimmune problems that Asian women don't seem to develop, and why I can't tolerate soy when Asian women tolerate it just fine.
Silenced, my sympathy re: the autoimmune problems. Mine tend more towards lungs/heart/kidneys. So I take it you have found treatment for the thyroid effective?
My sympathies too. Yes. I take synthroid. I've learned to adjust my dosage when it feels like too much or too little. I pick a little chunk off the pill if I haven't been sleeping well, or I'll take the whole thing if I've been feeling too sleepy.
I also take an immune suppressant. I had to take prednisone for four years, which felt like having the Devil live inside my head. I was able to go off prednisone after I made all those changes to my lifestyle and diet that I listed previously.
So now my doctor is impressed.
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Excuse me Andrew but it's too early to say we have decreasing snowmelt
[Read the article: Cry "fire" and let loose the dogs of climate change!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But at the same time, California is experiencing decreasing snowmelt, longer summers and a gradual rise in temperatures, which are putting other regions in the state at risk.
Last ski season royally sucked, I agree. We have less snowmelt this year, that is for sure. As for a pattern of decreasing snowmelt, I think you'll find this is not yet born out by the snowfall history charts posted at mammothmountain.com.
The season before last had record snowfall. Mammoth was open for skiing until July 4, and Tioga Pass wasn't cleared until late June.
There was so much snow the year before last, they had a huge slab avalanche on Climax -- on a patrolled slope, after avalanche control, in the middle of the day.
I was there that day. I got to work the probe line. No casualties, luckily. The missing snowboarders turned up in the cocktail lounge, drinking Jagermeisters and watching ESPN while all the patrol and volunteers busted their behinds probing the avalanche debris for their dead bodies.
That was one hell of a year.
Now according to to that guy at JPL -- the one who was dead wrong about the previous two years but right about last year -- we're heading for ten years of drought in the West.
If that's true than we WILL see a pattern of decreasing snowmelt.
But we don't know that he's right, because he said we wouldn't have any snow in 2005-2006 and instead we had the most snow ever, since they started recording.
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An addendum to decreasing snowmelt
[Read the article: Cry "fire" and let loose the dogs of climate change!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I just looked at Mammoth snowfall records. They're have 9" so far this October, and the month is not over. Last year they only had 4 inches by Halloween. The year before last, the record year, they got seven inches.
If it were valid to extrapolate the whole season from October, then it would look like we're heading for another big snow year.
However, it's not valid to make that extrapolation, so we just have to wait and see if this "pattern of decreasing snowmelt" actually turns out to be a pattern and not just another fluctuation.
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@Serai1, try checking with some skiers
[Read the article: Cry "fire" and let loose the dogs of climate change!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The river that brings water to just about the all of Southern California is now drying up because of reducing snowmelt and increasing population demands all along its length.
As far as I've heard, the skiing in the Rockies and Utah has been good the past few years.
There certainly are increased population demands but I'd check the last ten years of ski reports if I were you before talking about decreasing snowmelt.
The year before last was the biggest snow year ever recorded in the Sierra Nevada. And last year was hardly the worst.
The worst snow years happened back in the late seventies. That was a very bad drought. The skiers were pretty unhappy, and there was water rationing as well.
It's not obvious that global warming has to result in less snowfall. It could make the winter weather more erratic, which would mean in some years we'd get more snow than we knew what to do with.
That's what happened in 2005-2006. There was more snow than people knew what to do with. It just kept coming and coming and coming.
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This validates my theory about the Trojan War
[Read the article: Brand-name bullies]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One of the first uses of clothing other than warmth was to differentiate the rulers from the ruled upon.
See how much stress this impulse causes kids? Imagine how much stress it might cause a King in ancient Greece who just lost his royal clothing designer along with all of her intellectual property and her team of skilled labor, and was cuckolded at the same time.
It's tempting to say, "Oh these terrible times we live in, everything is just getting worse."
But look at all the myths that feature magic robes, poison robes, clothing that allows people to become like goddesses and gods.
I think people have been fighting these urges since clothing began. We just keep going through different phases of the same struggle.