Letters to the Editor
had_enough
Published Letters: 814 Editor's Choice: 48
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Hey, King, about the Tour..
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...nice to have you back here on the Left Coast, for whatever reason. In my favorite city.. where I don't live.. and nice to see you back at Salon. We missed ya.
Not for the first time, and not for the last, I'm thinking that all drugs of any kind should be legalized in professional sports. Let 'em take whatever they want, whenever they want, in whatever quantities. Let's train a whole new class of physicians whose specialty is getting the most out of the human body through chemistry.
This is a corollary to the notion that we should legalize *all* drugs, of any kind, for the general population. Tax them, regulate them, require a doctor's prescription for the really potent or dangerous ones. But, otherwise? Legalize 'em all, and let God sort 'em out. Really.
Why? Because no matter what anyone does, athletes are going to use chemistry to enhance their performance. Some won't, because they value their bodies and their lives too much to do so...they will lose. Except in the almost non-existent case of the genetic outlier.
Let athletes dope themselves to the gills. If it shortens their lives, or they die on the field of battle, so be it. Tommy Simpson died on road, and he's a damned legend for it. He was filled with speed, and god knows what all, but he's still a legend. Why? Because he was willing to sacrifice his life for the road. Taking drugs was just part of that.
The Belgian racers in the 70s (I name no names), were famous for the the Belgian Cocktail, a potent brew of amphetamine, mostly. There probably isn't a single winning professional cyclist in the last 50 years who didn't use *something* that would have had them disqualified had authorities known about it. And sometimes the authorities know and don't do anything about it.. The Belgian Cocktail was no secret in the 70s..
So, the whole thing is a joke and always has been, and I say, to restore credibility to cycling, and every other sport, just let 'em use whatever the hell they want. the guys who can't do it, leave the sport. Part of being a pro would be knowing you would have to do the drugs to be a winner.
Better this than the current state of affairs. The money and status is so enormous in cycling, and other sports, now, that these guys are gonna take the drugs whether we outlaw them or not. Just like a street-junkie is gonna do the same.
Legalize everything, regulate and monitor use, and let the games really begin!!
You think I'm kidding? I'm not.
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@sunspot...perfect
[Read the article: Stocks plunge as investors flee risk]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]sunspot wrote:
We're gonna pay the price for Republican free market oil slave idiocy for generations as a result.
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Well said. Much better than I could have. It'd be nice if a few idiot cornucopians from the 1980s are still around when the decline begins to bite. We could string them up by their nuts as a salutary example. Because, we had a fighting chance to have a very different future 30 years ago. Capitalist absolutists insured that we are now formally doomed. I'd really like to string up few of them before the end.
It was all just human nature, as Jay Hanson would say, but still.............
One other point for Adam: we won't have the *energy* to exploit alternative energy sources. It takes *energy* to exploit alternative sources, and if our fossil-fuels are rapidly declining by the time we realize what's happening, there will not be enough energy to build the solar panels, the hydro projects, the wind-turbines, the tidal and geothermal generation systems, and most of all, no energy to build the nuclear plants that are our most likely medium-term salvation.
Even assuming we have enough energy to build enough nuclear plants to stave off the darkness...we'll need an entire country's worth of electric vehicles. The batteries for those, the really good ones, Lithium-ion or better, are very energy-intensive to build.
Electrified rail makes a lot more sense, but will we have the energy left to re-build our entire rail system? It's doubtful.
Not to mention time. We aren't going to have time. That's the main problem. We'll run out of time.
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another attaboy
[Read the article: The really smart, serious, credible Iraq experts O'Hanlon and Pollack]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Great, great piece.
You're right. Our political system is broken. Everyone is lying, all the time. It's like being in the Cesare Borgia's court during his wars in central Italy.
These guys are desperately trying to salvage their reputations. Why does Brookings still employ them?
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none of this matters
[Read the article: In Baghdad, time for a break]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]it's all just static. Once the grand neo-con plan for Iraq was an obvious disaster, the new plan was, and is: delay, delay, delay. Spin, spin, spin. Lie as much and as often as necessary. Don't worry about our captive lapdogs in the press, they're on our side. And nobody reads those fleas from McClatchy. And blogs? What are those? Besides, our base reads Drudge and LGF and Malkin to the extent they read anything.
Delay the whole thing until January 2009. Lie about progress so that we can plausibly accuse the Dems of being surrender-monkeys, and maybe we can keep the Senate.
Once we're out of office, and someone has to clean up our mess, almost certainly a Dem, we'll blame the whole thing on her, or him. Wash, rinse, repeat, as often as necessary.
It's so patently obvious what's going on. A bright 5-year-old would understand it.
I suspect history is going to treat the Bush administration about as well as it's treated the British High Command on the Western Front in WWI. If they're lucky.