Letters to the Editor
TomRitchford
Published Letters: 258 Editor's Choice: 11
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Thanks for comment, Deeper Truth...
[Read the article: Hillary's time of troubles]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]and I appreciate the polite words... but please look at her website... at her stump speech... at her quotes...
When she authorized Bush to go to war, YOU knew and if you didn't I *certainly fucking knew* that the war was a total con. Everyone knew that the weapons inspectors had given a mostly clean bill of health. Everyone knew that Saddam was a tinpot little dictator who had nothing in his hand.
There was *no evidence* of any "weapons of mass destruction" -- everyone knew it!
If she truly, truly made a mistake -- then she should pay for it. Hundreds of thousands having paid for this terrible mistake with their lives -- that Hillary should pay with her career is quite reasonable.
She had all the information she needed. We called out to her -- we -- *I* -- wrote letters to her -- she ignored them -- she talked tough -- she's STILL talking about dropping a nuclear weapon on Iran.
Let's put it another way -- your candidate is willing to drop nuclear weapons on Iran *as a first strike*.
*** There is no way in a trillion years I could support Hillary Clinton after that. ***
Frankly, you can write till you're blue in the face, I'll read and think about what you say.
But unless Hillary is willing to say, "I won't drop an atom bomb on Iran if they don't drop an atom bomb on anyone," she will never ever have my support.
(And that's against her relentless desire to *take your tax money and mine and give it to the military industrial complex show has show time and again they they aren't even as competent as your average McDonald's worker.*)
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that last paragraph again.
[Read the article: Hillary's time of troubles]
[Read more letters about this article: Here](And that's against her relentless desire to *take your tax money and mine and give it to the military industrial complex, who has have shown time and time again they they aren't even as competent as your average McDonald's worker.*)
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If you don't like the WSJ article...
[Read the article: The WSJ editorial page lies about our surveillance laws]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...then go to their site and post a comment! Note that the comments there are uniformly negative -- even though I know that the WSJ generally censors comments that disapprove of it -- so they have to be getting a huge volume of criticism.
A short comment that takes 30 seconds is much better than a wordy penetrating, insightful one you don't actually have time to make.
I also sent one to the National Review. I'm sure they won't print it :-D but if they get a thousand such letters it's going to put fear into their hearts and make them aware that we really are watching when they lie to us.
Where's Eugene Debs when we need him? Where's Saul Alinsky? Thank God we have Glenn Greenwald!
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Who is Salon's ombudsman?
[Read the article: Journalism's last line of defense]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Who is Salon's ombudsman?
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The Party of Fear!
[Read the article: Jihadis throw a wild bash over the Protect America Act]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I love it!
The Republicans: the Party of Fear. I'm going to use that from now on!
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Some notes from an active musician.
[Read the article: Rock vs. jazz]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]To establish some cred, I host and play a Monday night music show in the East Village; while it isn't jazz (I don't really swing but I do cook) it's pretty well all improvised so I spend hours a week making up music from nothing in front of an audience.
It's pretty clear to me what the trouble a lot of people have with a lot of jazz; it's lacking in tension and therefore in release.
Listen to your typical jazz song. There's the "head", the statement of the tune with the band all together, and then a series of solos. If you watch, you'll see the musicians arrange politely to see who gets to do the next solo. Finally, when everyone's had their fill, they repeat the head and end.
No one ever sweats. You know what you're going to play before you start; and it's probably something you've played before.
One of the reasons why Miles' bands and particularly his electric period were so successful is that he hated this too. He'd literally lead the band; there wasn't necessarily a head; sometimes he'd just stop the band and point to a player out of the blue, symbolically saying, "You're on." As a musician, I can hear it in the solos - some of them start with a scream of musical fear. Nothing mannered about this music!
The first poster wrote: "To the Musician: If you need to study the math of music in order to play it you'll probably never master it."
I assume you don't actually play yourself, right?
I have a good perspective on this as I'm an active player who's also got an old but still fresh degree in mathematics. The point is that it's all mathematics; it's not formal like mathematics but each blue note is a fraction, each riff a geometric pattern. You can hear it in all jazz, heck, in all music; and I'd claim that tons of music like Monk's is simply incomprehensible without an intuitive grasp of mathematical structure.
I still remember the first time I heard "Straight, No Chaser," simply laughing at the outrageousness of the structure of the lead riff and then sitting down to work out that he manages to cover 11 of the 12 tones. You don't need to formally understand the mathematics to understand the cleverly broken geometry of that piece.
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quick plug for the show mentioned above
[Read the article: Rock vs. jazz]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I should have put this in the previous post but I'm so bad at the PR part :-(
We play improvised live looping music with dancers and tricks and strange every Monday night in the East Village: http://swirly.com
Thanks for your indulgence.
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It's obvious that the government's cover story is not true; you basically admit it; so why use "conspiracy"?
[Read the article: Satellite shoot-down conspiracies]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's obvious to anyone that the chances of flammable rocket fuel making it to the surface of the Earth were zero. Perhaps some debris might hit the earth, rocket fuel never. This has been written about by authorities, not one independent thinks this story holds the slightest water.
So why mention "conspiracy theories" if we actually know the official story is not true?
I'm sure it's exactly what most people think: the US wanted to show they could hit a satellite if they wanted. I do not think I'm a conspiracy theorist for believing this.