Letters to the Editor
cabdriver
Published Letters: 594 Editor's Choice: 8
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The Global Human Population
[Read the article: Earth to PETA]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Anyone who thinks that the global human population can be reduced from its current level of around 6 billion within the next 50-100 years simply by controlling the human birth rate hasn't done the math.
And anyone who insists that it's imperative for the human population to be halved, quartered, or reduced to 1 billion or lower within the next 50 years is implicitly supporting "death control": the engineering of genocides and megadeath casualty counts- which is the only effective strategy for achieving such goals.
Find the stats, do the math. A couple of links with which to begin: http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.html
http://dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Issues_and_Causes/Population/Statistics/
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Fish As A Food Source
[Read the article: Earth to PETA]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Re: some earlier comments relating to the commerical extinction of fisheries such as the Pacific sardine-
I think it's important to note that the decline in many fish stocks across the planet is not entirely due to overfishing. That's undeniably an important factor in many cases, but habitat loss and pollution often play roles that are at least as significant in species declines, and they're not to be dismissed or underestimated as a factor.
I also think that it needs to be noted that not all forms of commercial fishing are equal in terms of their energy consumption, or in terms of having a deleterious impact on ecosystems. Determining and enforcing commercial fishing regulations and prohibitions in order to maintain sustainable fish populations is imperative. But it's a task that becomes much easier when the aquatic ecosystems themselves are unburdened of toxic pollution, nutrient algae blooms, huge volumes of plastic debris, nonbiodegradable nets and longlines, ailing estuaries and littoral zones, and degraded or inaccesible spawning grounds for fish and shellfish populations.
I'm not sure what percentage of human food and protein demandthat fisheries can supply on a global basis. But I have no doubt that they should properly have the potential to play an increasing role, not a diminishing one- once humans begin to respect and nurture aquatic ecosystems again, instead of continually abusing them in the nihilistic pursuit of wastrel economics and heedless waste disposal.
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what about the other guys?
[Read the article: Petraeus named second most influential "conservative"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What riles me most about the media coverage of the near-meteoric "rise of Petraeus" is that almost no one in the news broadcasts or articles points out the context for his Ascension.
What ever became of so many of his counterparts and predecessors, like Generals Shineski, Sanchez, and Abazaid?
http://weblogs.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/blog/2007/02/gen_casey_shinseki_mistreated.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/washington/13general.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/20/AR2006122000308.html?
And what about Generals Zinni, Newbold, Riggs, Swannack, Van Riper, Batiste, and Eaton?
http://www.neoconned.info/generals.html
I don't recall that sort of excoriating criticism of an ongoing war, from officers holding the rank of general, occuring in any previous war. That ought to qualify as Big News.
But to hear the discussion over the past two months, you'd think that General Patraeus was the only person of military expertise in the entire country. The dissenters get a blip, and they're out...
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Bamboo vs. Hemp
[Read the article: Bamboo shoots and trees]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There's another natural fabric out there- one that requires about 1/3 the water of cotton to grow; faces no natural pests comparable to the devastating boll weevil; is simultaneously more breathable and at least twice as durable as cotton- hemp.
In the early 1990s, I was once able to buy 50/50 hemp/cotton jeans, made in Romania, that were cut pretty much indistinguishable from cotton Levis- except that they broke in easier, were more comfortable, and lasted 3 times as long. Their weak spot was the thin pockets, evidently made of 100% cotton, that wore through long before the rest of the material wore out.
Those jeans were a blend, but 100% hemp can be woven as fine as linen. Its potential as a fabric has never been realized.
As "fashion", cannabis hemp was pushed into the "hoodlum youth" market by the mid-1990s, as part of the ongoing hoodlumization of cannabis/marijuana "weed" that's been so inevitable as a part of its mystifying illegal status. Now it seems to have gone the way of many another fashion fad- especially since the cultivation of cannabis hemp remains illegal in the USA. So, it's back to 100% King Cotton, which has always been much more comfortably capitalized as a crop- as well as drinking much of the American West dry, for its irrigation, and requiring saturation doses of pesticide.
Personally, I couldn't care less about fashion trendiness. I just want some eco-friendly, durable, breathable clothes to wear. Which marks me as one of the dreaded "hippie movement", I suppose.