Letters to the Editor
captainlarab
Published Letters: 541 Editor's Choice: 41
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Flawed logic
[Read the article: King Dick]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Here's Cheney's verbal slight-of-hand, in a nutshell. He takes the proposition that "sometimes the hard or unpopular decision is the right and principled one," citing the examples of Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, what have you. He then inverts that to reach the proposition that "if what we're doing in Iraq is unpopular, it must mean that we're very principled and doing the right thing."
It's kind of like the exercise motto "no pain, no gain." You meet these weirdo exercise fanatics who undermine or limit their athletic abilities by punishing themselves too hard, or exercising hard every day. They've basically inverted the "no pain, no gain" motto to mean, "if you're in pain, you must be gaining something."
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Author: Please read Edible Forest Gardens
[Read the article: Why I pick lettuce for the Black Panthers]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Please, please, please, check out this website and then purchase the two-volume set, either from the author or from Amazon.com:
http://www.edibleforestgardens.com/
I just ordered this book and received it last night, and was completely blown away by the time I got through the introduction. This is not just a gardening book, this is a bold vision for the future of the human species.
If you are looking for a low-maintenance, pesticide and fertilizer-free way to feed urban populations, open your eyes to a completely new concept of agriculture. Edible Forest Gardens operates on the concept that you can plant a carefully-chosen collection of perennial trees, shrubs, vines, and low-lying ground cover, or annuals that re-seed, that are specifically chosen for their ability to complement each other in a self-sustaining ecosystem, and that are ALL EDIBLE. It doesn't mean planting *in* a forest, it means creating your own forest by mimicking the self-sustaining aspects of a wild forest but doing it with edible plants.
It was written with the eastern US in mind, but it seems to me that the potential for this concept is even greater in California, where you can grow virtually anything. That said, the author freely admits that it will take years more of widespread experimentation and more scientific research on a wider variety of plants to perfect the methods described.
In other words, some plants "fix" nitrogen from the air and fertilize the soil, while other plants need nitrogen from the soil. So you plant those two varieties together--and we need to learn more about which varieties are which.
Many edible plants do not actually need full sun, so you don't need to uproot trees in a given area to grow food. You can grow food on vines that grow up into the trees.
Forestry gardening does mean you have to be willing to let go of the concept of growing the same things you typically find in a grocery store. It means embracing foods that were once the source of sustenance for pre-colonial Native Americans, foods like hog peanuts, purslane, and pawpaws. It also means letting go of neat little rows of vegetables all carefully labeled. But if you can get on board with that, it also means planting urban gardens that don't require hours and hours of maintenance, not to mention pesticides and methods of gardening that bear a large carbon footprint. The time and money expenses are all up front, in terms of research and planning. Take a couple of years or so planning and designing a space, and once you get it up and running, there's little else to do besides harvesting your food.
Please, if you like gardening and are interested in how to get fresh produce to the urban poor, you will not regret looking into this. And you might just save the planet in the process.
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Enough with the conspiracy-mongering
[Read the article: There was no "coverup"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Okay, I trust the Bushies about as far as I can throw them, but I feel I have to jump in when someone insinuates that Pat Tillman was murdered.
Look, folks, first off, friendly fire happens all the time. You can probably predict it statistically, just as you can anticipate that a certain number of troops are going to be killed or injured in vehicular accidents just getting to the battlefield.
Second, friendly fire happens because someone has screwed up royally. Actually, it doesn't take that much to screw up in a way that is conducive to friendly fire, but if your screw-up happens to result in a friendly fire death or injury, you are royally screwed. Among the screw-ups that lead to friendly fire incidents: Poor communication and coordination between or within units, people getting lost and ending up where they shouldn't, or people going to the right place but arriving either earlier or later than anticipated.
Third, because friendly fire is almost inevitably the direct result of someone's royal screw-up, there is *always* a strong instinct by those involved, to either cover it up, or else start concocting a version of the story that is most conducive to you deflecting blame or at least sharing blame with others. Friendly fire can be counted on to cost at least a handful of military careers. Plus, if you're the one responsible, you have a strong incentive towards self-deception; otherwise, how can you live with yourself?
So, my best guess (and admittedly, it's just a guess) is that someone in Tillman's unit knew almost immediately that he had been killed by friendly fire and knew almost immediately thereafter that someone was in big trouble. So the story that came out of that unit was, at best, confusing, and at worst, criminally dishonest, as it percolated up the chain of command. But at the higher and more politically-aware echelons, people who know why Tillman was symbolicially important genuinely wanted to believe the "Pat Tillman as War Hero" story, so they did. It was only later that they realized that friendly fire was involved and that the matter was still under investigation, and by that point they were all royally screwed and have been engaging in this pathetic tap dance ever since.