Letters to the Editor
Arlo Figg
Published Letters: 157 Editor's Choice: 2
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Statistics & the truth
[Read the article: Memo to Bill O'Reilly: More immigrants equals less crime]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'd feel more comfortable about statistics on straight numerical lists like apples and oranges, rather than on a statistical population like "illegal immigrants and crime" if the polling for this exercise were done by a group of "whites", a group of African Americans, a group of latino Americans, and some disinterested group, say made up of a Norwegian, a Ghanaian, and a French Guyanan, and then have the polling statistics from the four groups sent to a country like Switzerland for final analysis. I've got very little faith anymore in demographic polls taken by let's say Fox News or the New York Times, the balkanization of American politics has reached a point where the validity of any poll with political overtones taken, by let's use the present example, one Harvard University researcher, has to be questioned as to its validity. What's being said by Harvard is that working class American citizens are more prone to crime than illegal immigrants, and why would that be? Because the wealthy in America want to stay wealthy by not paying working class Americans decent wages, they would rather hire illegal workers who'll work for less, with less tax issues you see also, as you don't report the wages, wink, wink? In the first place all illegal immigrants have committed a crime by default, by entering the USA without passports and visas if necessary, or residency documents. You or I for example can't enter England without the proper documentation illegally, without being jailed and deported. Hey, we've automatically got a criminal record, how'd that look on your resume? Another point is, why would illegal immigrants want to accurately report crime rates within their own communities? Thirdly, what's this idea that the USA can forever take in every economic refugee created but societies even more corrupt and violent than our own? Aren't there enough LEGAL immigrants waiting patiently in line to emigrate here? Why do illegal immigrants get to jump the line? If America paid it's working class decent wages we'd have a lot lower levels of crime, and less need of illegal labor. Pay citizens 25 dollars an hour to pick fruit and see how many American citizens show up for work. Ah, but then these jobs will go back to the tropical countries. Well, perhaps that's were the fruit picking jobs belong, then there wouldn't be this economic vacuum for cheap illegal labor up here. When we were in high school we washed dishes for spending money, today we spoil our kids rotten, why this rotten sense of entitlement has crept so insiduously into our society. I'm entitled to cheap domestic help etc. etc.
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Hurricane Camille
[Read the article: Real inconvenient truths]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Camille Paglia's intellect is wasted on a lot of the posters on this thread. I've never read a more insightful take on Al Gore, Camille's also a armchair geologist, fantastic. It's a sad scary fact that many superior-minded supporters of Gore are so ignorant of science, perhaps this just reflects how wanting an American Liberal Arts education is these days. The gushing idoltry exhibited at the feet of Al Gore at the Oscars was embarrasing, science majors in India and China could see right through this charade. An Inconvenient Truth is psuedoscience of the highest order. There's never a universal concensus in the scientific community about anything, generally. That's right, this present warming cycle started a few tens of thousands of years ago and has been punctuated by several cold snaps superimposed on the general warming trend. Big bad civilization was nowhere to be found when the present global warming trend started. An Inconvenient Truth is a convenient work of propaganda for more government taxation.