Letters to the Editor
bloomsbury
Published Letters: 406 Editor's Choice: 5
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link, what link?
[Read the article: What the Poling autism case means]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]When a child is developing normally and speaking normally until they have a vaccination and thereafter begin to display symptoms of brain damage, the only people who can claim there's no link are the usual suspects. Namely doctors who administered the vaccine and the drug companies who make it, both of whom can probably be sued from one end of the country to the other for the fact that parents are now wedded for life to a brain damaged child. I can see their problem. To stop vaccinating is also impossible. It might have been the mercury in the vaccine, or it might just be some peculiarity of the vaccine itself that we don't understand. Even the most gifted neurologist will admit they only understand the function of 10% of the human brain. The other 90% is a mystery, even to them. When you hear parent after parent tell the same story: normal child, speaking normally, interacting normally and then they have the vaccine, and the change in some cases is from one day to the next,you have to take it seriously. Each immunisation seems to increase the damage in some children and it's clear and observable for the parents but removing the mercury preservative hasn't made the number of autism cases drop as far as I know. It has been described as an epidemic by some doctors. If it was a simple matter of a mercury based preservative then why does the damage only occur in a minority of the children? Most children have little more than a slight fever after a vaccination and no damage so why didn't they all react to the mercury? It could be an allergic reaction in some children and not others but no one really knows. It would be interesting to know if the number of autism cases has fallen since the mercury was removed.
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the hate bug
[Read the article: I don't believe in atheists]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't know anything about the others but Christopher Hitchens not only hates God, he hates women and I suspect he hates men, children and animals too. He's the man who claimed that all those people who came out on to the streets of london to mourn Princess Diana weren't there and it was all some kind of media conspiracy. His view of the world is full of hate and contempt for others. He not a lefty - he just thinks he is. He is intolerant and Calvinist in his attitudes, even though he's an atheist. He would love to have another Inquisition and burn all the dead wood - but not for God, let's get that straight. In short he's a mental case and he might be dangerous if anyone took him seriously but the only one who takes him seriously is Christopher Hitchens. On the Iraq war he's stupider than George W. Bush and you don't meet people like that on every street corner.
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wake up! Guantanamo IS a sickening truth
[Read the article: A sickening truth at Guantánamo]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]An American history teacher was teaching a course on the Nazi era. After watching Nazi atrocities on film, his students told him that the fault lay in the Germans and these things could never happen in America. To prove them wrong and with their permission he turned his classroom into a microcosm of Nazism. He demanded unthinking obedience and conformity and invented flags, slogans and salutes to bond the students into a unit.He told them they belonged to an elite group with a superior ideology. To the teachers's amazement this movement he had invented spread to the entire campus: it was called The Wave. The idea of being part of an elite group bonded to achieve a higher ideal was extremely seductive. Eventually those who were not part of The Wave found they were being ostracised and bullied as those in the movement became more and more fanatical. School authorities became concerned and told the teacher to end the experiment. To end it he held a rally, like a mini Nuremberg rally, and told his students they would now see the face of their leader. He put their leader's face up on a large screen. No prizes for guessing who the face belonged to. Someone should do the same for the guards at Guantanamo and the soldiers in Iraq. If they really understood the monstrous ideas their lives and their bodies are being used to support, most of them would walk. The psychopaths would stay but there aren't enough of them to fight a war or even run a concentration camp. Without the delusion of doing evil in the name of a higher goal, evil is just evil and seen as such. Without the demonization of the 'other' because he's different and therefore evil/inferior, war would be impossible and so would places like Guantanamo. You can imagine how the thought of that would make the fanatics of the Pentagon and the CIA wet their jockey shorts. The similarity to fundamentalist, extremist (Jihadist)thinking is obvious in the treatment of people in Guantanamo and the Ubermensch thinking of the Bush Administration with its total disregard for the law and the constitution. As one of Hitler's followers put it: 'Hitler is not vulnerable to the dispensation of justice because his cause is justice itself.' Inventing your own brand of justice is what lynch mobs and tyrants do.