Letters to the Editor
TomRitchford
Published Letters: 210 Editor's Choice: 10
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Your bias is showing.
[Read the article: Thugs for puppies]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So there are these crazy animal activists, terrorizing this poor stock broker whose only crime is to support some company that's torturing a few thousand hapless animals to death every year!
And I'm very much in favour of animal vivisection. I take medication all the time -- I'm very well aware of the fact that none of this would exist in the useful form it is without animal testing.
So why do I think that you are, pardon me, full of shit?
Because I know full well that the battle is not equal, that places like Huntingdon are money-grubbing corporations that care not one scrap for the lives and comfort of animals under their care -- or for anything else other than profit.
After Ken Saro-Wiwa, it is very clear where the battle lines are drawn. These massive companies are designed, are legally set up so they have no conscience of any type. In fact, the directors of these companies would be criminally liable if they ever allowed their consciences to get in the way of the profits for their publicly-traded enterprises.
That stock broker believes in his heart that he has no moral responsibility for the stocks he makes a market in, no matter how evil they are. This is a profound sin, a sin that is destroying the moral fibre of our civilization. If this man needs to get thousands of phone messages before he understands that he does bear a responsibility for his actions, even if they are making money, then so be it.
Your article is deplorable, well-beneath your regular high quality, which showcases informed, compassionate writing. Huntingdon has made no attempt to negotiate, no attempt to fix up their torture chambers. Animal sacrifice is necessary to help humanity -- at the same time, needless pain for animals is a disgusting crime that needs to be avoided if at all possible.
Decades of polite protests about the maltreatment of animals have shown how useless such things are -- we've been writing about this since Sinclair's "The Jungle" and Americans haven't even moved in self-interest to protect their food supply, let alone get fix the needlessly brutal death machines that they have constructed. These immoral, immortal, irresponsible companies will never change their ways until they are forced to. More power to SHAC!
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Thank you.
[Read the article: Abu Ghraib and Salon]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I really appreciate this (and so many other things like this) and so do a lot of other people. Keep up the good work. Perhaps one day we'll get our country and our Constitution back.
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Don't rely on the Athabaska tar sands.
[Read the article: Exxon: We've got plenty of oil!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Just reading the first line of your article made me expect a reference to the "huge" reserves of oil stored as sticky tar sands in Alberta.
I lived in Canada as a kid and I've been hearing about them for three decades now. The terrible trouble is that it's very expensive, in energy terms, to remove the sand. Right now, for every four barrels of oil-equivalent in energy you put into the sanes, you get five barrels out, and it's not at all clear that major improvements in this process are impending, or even possible.
So when you hear about the tar sands, just knock 80% off the number of barrels in your head. Despite Exxon's sunny claims, there is an awful lot to worry about.
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If that 43% growth rate continued...
[Read the article: Blowing away the nukes]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]then windpower would be producing all electrical energy in about just over 12 years (Google for "(log(100/1.5) /log(1.41)) years" -- it's 1.41 because overall annual energy growth in the world is "about" 2%).
Exponential growth is great... the question is how long you can keep it up. At a certain point, scale factors start to come into play as you use up the good places to put your fans.