Letters to the Editor
sunspot
Published Letters: 349 Editor's Choice: 43
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Denial
[Read the article: Manufacturing belief]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Am I the only person that gets mad when somebody calls themselves an atheist? That's a specific title saying that you don't believe in any God(s). The title is a negative. It's an active state of denial.
Pretty much everybody is an atheist. The vast majority of Christians don't believe in the divinity of Zeus, to name just one obvious example. An atheist merely has one less god than a Christian. I fail to see how they're anymore living in a "state of denial" than any Christian. Or Muslim. Or Jew. Or whatever.
Further, they are unable to acknowledge the limits of conventional science to explain the whole of reality.
What exactly are these limits? And what part of reality has religion successfully explained? I certainly don't pray my car to work in the morning. Burning incense doesn't keep our nuclear power plants running.
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S'alright
[Read the article: Music Video: "Dance Tonight," Paul McCartney]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Has Paul McCartney ever made a good video? This is easily the best video of his I've ever seen.
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Big Whoop
[Read the article: And are you their grandmother?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We let any idiot breed, regardless of whether they have the money, the brainpower, or the temperament to raise children. So why get uptight over older people having kids? I can think of a thousand other reasons why someone shouldn't be allowed to have kids that are at least as important, if not far more important.
I was raised by my grandmother and my great aunt, who were 48 and 50 when I was born. They did at least as good a job on me as my grandmother and grandfather had done raising my aunts and uncles decades earlier, probably better.
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Better With Age
[Read the article: And are you their grandmother?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I wish the babies well. They will have to grow up rapidly to fit the parents' stage of life. No noise, no shrieking, not too many other children in the house. No this or that or the other.
Above all no patience for the child.
My aunts and uncles all told me my grandmother had far more patience for my childhood antics than she'd ever had for theirs. I got away with stuff that they would have been tarred and feathered for when she was younger. And since I was an only child, she was under far less stress than she'd been as a young mother raising five kids at once.
It's difficult to say how age is going to impact parenting. Some people mellow with age, some people become bigger assholes than they ever were. I think it depends more on the individual than on a calendar.
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Our worthless media
[Read the article: The truth about cat and dog food]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Many of the recent recalls were not widely reported in the press. When my cat's food was recalled, I only found out because of blogs like this one.
That's because the corporate American press is totally and utterly worthless. We know more about Britney Spears and her tedious meltdowns than we do about issues – like contaminated pet food – that impact millions of Americans' everyday lives.
We should grind up the press for pet food. It would be the first useful thing most of them have contributed to in their lives. I'd gladly feed my cat a can of Rupert Murdoch – cats need a lot of fat in their diet.
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Nothing New Here
[Read the article: And are you their grandmother?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Everything you've described Hattie could have happened to someone 10, 20, even 30 years younger than your friend. What difference does her age make?
Yeah, you don't have as much "energy" as you get older (typically). So what? Once they're past toddler stage kids don't require that much energy to keep up with, just patience and planning. And in general older people are (at least) as good at that as younger people.
Remember, in traditional societies the parents frequently went out to work the fields or hunt, returning at nightfall exhausted. The children were left behind to be looked after by their siblings and elders. Old folks have been raising children for an eternity. The only difference now is that women can have their own children a decade later than was possible before, as opposed to just raising their grandchildren.
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Idiotic Free Market Lunatics
[Read the article: The truth about cat and dog food]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Let's hope our trading partners take the appropriate steps to insure what they're selling us is safe
Yes. Let's hope professional fraudsters, scammers and hucksters stop bilking us. We'll pray to the god of the marketplace for relief.
This free market, global trade stupidity will finally come to a halt when a shipment of poisoned food from China is turned into human food by some unscrupulous business goon, and kills hundreds or thousands of American kids. That will include the children of free market nutbags who are standing around waiting for the Chinese government(!) and Chinese businessmen(!!!) to protect them.