Letters to the Editor
ELYDOG
Published Letters: 497 Editor's Choice: 43
-
Planned economy
[Read the article: How to solve America's water problems]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Nulla,
We have wind and solar up here too. We have not tried to move to an area that nature has made a desert. Las Vegas, San Diego, Phoenix, Los Angeles and even Atlanta are unsustainable.
But the baseline here, to avoid state wars, is we should have national planning in the economy and laws. That is what water resource depletion and global warming and peak oil are all saying.
So before we hand other states' water, we need city development restrictions in the south. We need laws passed to ban lawns. We need anything that leads to excess water use restricted, strangled, or outlawed. If the south and southwest do this, perhaps the north will sympathize. If the south and southwest decide that they just want water, without any changes, then you will have a problem, Houston.
Uncontrolled capitalist development is over.
-
Straw Man
[Read the article: How to solve America's water problems]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Only a few people here are saying 'to hell with you." Most are saying, if you make attempts not to waste water, then perhaps people will feel sympathy. Unfortunately, no one has EVER seen one of these cities do anything involving 'development' to limit water use. Just watering and washing bans. Pathetic.
No one has sympathy for a half wit like Sonny Perdue, who tore up Atlanta's water conservation program. Plenty of people in Atlanta are doing their best. But Coca Cola is the largest single user of water in Atlanta. Besides turning off their fountain, what have they done? (Which even Perdue didn't ask them to do...) And perhaps, do we even NEED Coca Cola from a bottling plant in Georgia?
Or the vast amounts of water used for factory farming of corn or corn ethanol? That will be a question for the midwest.
Straw men make great punching bags, but poor arguments.
-
Bottled Water
[Read the article: How to solve America's water problems]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Reading about Michigan's environmental problems makes me sick. I live in Minnesota and we have some drought, unrestrained city growth and the slow degradation of our state forests. Water pollution is alive and well from small communities dumping sewage directly into the rivers and streams. And of course, there is corn pesticide and fertilizer runnoff. Hello, Louisiana dead zone! Stil, Michigan I think has us 'beat.'
But the point the Michiganders are making about bottled water depleting the aquifer seems to be 'easily' avoidable, if a politician actually stood up to a corporation. Desani, which is made by Atlanta's Coca Cola company, is taken from public water systems in Georgia, and then sold in plastic bottles at a profit to people who think their tap water is bad. (!!) Pepsi does the same thing with their 'water' product - using public water systems. And now Michigan is allowing this to happen on a massive scale under thieir own feet.
This robbing of the public's water is also going on in India on a massive scale. Bottled water should be outlawed.
-
Obama isn't seen as 'black'
[Read the article: Obama's double magic]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Obama isn't seen as 'black american' by most whites, I think. As Hitchens points out, he is mixed, and he also has a direct African heritage. So for all Kamiya's hosannas about the second coming of Martin Luther King, I offer this. It's not the color of your skin, but the content of your character.
-
Hall of Mirrors
[Read the article: A penny for your deepest thoughts]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Self-consciousness can become a hall of mirrors, as you can reflect on the reflection. If you've smoked a joint, or suffered from 'overthought' you know what I'm talking about.
But hidden in every hall is the actual body. Congratulations to these researchers for trying to discover it. Idealism is finally becoming scientifically impossible.
-
Savings?
[Read the article: Ben "tough guy" Bernanke puts up his dukes]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Every time the fed 'lowers' the interest rate to help the banks, the rates for CDs goes down. I've been putting money away in what I 'think' is a safe place, at 5% interest, in CDs, for awhile, like we are 'supposed' to do.
But if the Fed lowers interest rates, this just encourages spending and decreases saving. Who's going to put money in a CD at 2% or less?
The Federal Reserve is a private institution RUN by the banking industry, individual members of which sit on it's board of governors. Who do you think they are going to help? The U.S. needs a actually federally-controlled "Federal" Reserve, not a fake "federal" resserve.
-
Stalingrad - Kursk Etc.
[Read the article: "We're all fascists now"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Soviet troops smashed the Wehermacht in Russia and paid the heaviest price in civilian and military casualties compared to any nation on the planet. They essentially won the western theatre of the World War.
A Soviet (and Jewish) newspaperman, Vassily Grossman, was the first newsman in Treblinka. His heart-rending document on that place was later read into the record at Nuremberg.
In China, troops of the Chinese Red Army fought the Japanese fascists for many years, even before the "world" war started, and actually took on the most Japanese troops of any country.
Not to mention every 'liberal' enlisting in the U.S. army for that war.
Now we are supposed to believe that the people that destroyed the fascists, are the same as the fascists. Unfortunately for Goldberg, history cannot be re-written.
-
Mussolini
[Read the article: "We're all fascists now"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Communist-led partisans in Italy hung Mussolini and his mistress. 'Nuff said. I think they could tell what national 'socialism' really was.
By the way, every big capitalist in Italy supported Mussolini. The corporate state is nothing but a face for 'free' enterprise.
-
Harold Washington's Win
[Read the article: Chicago is Barack Obama's kind of town]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This article is accurate in placing Harold Washington's win in context. Washington won AGAINST the Democratic machine. He won AGAINST the Chicago power structure and elite. The night of his election, there was almost a riot as citizens came out for Washington, and against an attempt to shaft him by the Democrat machine. Thousands hit the streets. This was truly a people's movement outside the control of monied interests, and something not seen in Chicago for years.
Giving birth to Jackson, Braun and now Obama, that people's movement did something for the national standing of black folks that hasn't yet been put back in the box.