Letters to the Editor
jebldmm
Published Letters: 933 Editor's Choice: 164
-
You missed the "money quote"
[Read the article: Bill O'Reilly explains the African-American]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You should have led with: "There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea". Does anybody actually think that mature adults in the real world go around talking like that? How can anybody think that way? Does he also think that Britney Spears behavior is typical of all white women? It's also a bit surreal that he walks into a restaurant with predominantly black clientele with Al Sharpton and thinks that the "big commotion" that results is because people there watch his show. Amazing. Absolutely Amazing.
-
A big misunderstanding
[Read the article: Oversight is for wimps]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Apparently, Congress does not understand that the United States of America is no longer a democracy with a tripartite system of government. We are now a "nation at war", and that requires absolute control by the executive branch. The legislative branch and the judicial branch exist only to rubber stamp the activities of the unitary executive. No speech or actions not approved by the executive shall be allowed in the halls of Congress. No oversight shall be exercised in which the actions of the executive branch or it's minions are criticized or exposed to the public. Congress should really get with the program before the Executive has to do something drastic, like unilaterally start another war to show people who is really in control.
-
I knew an anorexic girl when I was a teenager
[Read the article: Fashion weak]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]She told me that she had been so thin that she required hospitalization. She was beautiful. Thin and beautiful. I felt at the time that I was big and ugly. I was big. 5'9" with a healthy slavic build. I suppose a lot of teenagers feel unattractive, but even then, at 13, I realized that there was something wrong with a society that had a standard for beauty that required girls to be so thin that they required hospitalization. Even now I feel the pressure to have the perfect body. Face it - thin women get admired, "fat" women get mocked. Britney Spears was mocked for appearing in a bikini. There were a lot of good reasons to mock her performance, but her body is amazing for a woman who has had 2 babies. We admire actresses and models who are stick thin and willowy, a standard most women cannot attain.
The fashion industry says it's not their fault, and they are partly right - it's not entirely their fault. They are just feeding society's fantasy, like a drug dealer feeds an addict's habit. It's really the fault of a society that is so focused on youth and beauty that the only way to gain full acceptance is to artificially modify your body so that you never appear to be over 16 years old. If you can do this without crossing the line into anorexia, then more power to you. But if you happen to be a bit too thin... well... "you can never be too rich or too thin", right?
-
There is a much bigger story
[Read the article: Dan Rather stands by his story]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This isn't about Rather, or about Bush. It's about the media manipulating facts to favor a political party that they feel will benefit them financially. This is the story of how a completely incompetent man got into the white house, because people believed he was competent, because the media attacked his opponent openly while covering up their favored candidate's many flaws. If America is to function again as a Democracy, the media have to start reporting the facts, not distorting them for financial gain.
-
We need better scientific education in the U.S.
[Read the article: Autism debate, Take 5,832]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't know where people got the idea that scientists are all bought and paid for by industry. There are a lot of scientists worldwide working for non-profits organizations and governments and educational institutions. And a lot of people have looked for the causes of autism, yet nobody has found a correlation between autism and thimerosal. This is either the biggest coverup in history (it would have to involve thousands of scientists), or there is nothing to find. If a scientist was able to find the cause of autism, especially if it was something simple to fix like a chemical preservative in vaccines, he/she would probably get a nobel prize, and would definitely be remembered by history as a hero.
Regardless, there is no excuse not to vaccinate a healthy child. Thimerosal vaccinations are widely available (California has banned thimerosal entirely in most childhood vaccines). Any parent who refuses to vaccinate, assuming that their child will be safe becaue all of the other kids are vaccinated, is both selfish and a fool. There are other parents thinking the same thing, and your child is very likely to be exposed to diseases that would be prevented by widespread immunization.
Sometimes the truth is counter-intuitive. It seems so simple: Children get vaccinations, then they show signs of autism. There must be a connection, right? It's like having a cluster of cancer's in a small community. It must be caused by the water, because that's all they have in common. But sometimes a cluster is just a coincidence, and sometimes when B happens after A it isn't because B is caused by A.
-
Screw beltway Democrats.
[Read the article: The Susan Estrich Complex]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]They aren't the problem. The problem is that "the liberal" media are still bending over backward to be nice to right-wingers, in order to prove that they aren't really liberal, and we're still buying the meme that it's all the Democrats fault. Every time the media find a person who calls himself a Democrat who will trash the party, we focus once again on how evil and disloyal our side is and immediately forget that there are a lot of Democrats who would be better for the party, if only Fox would let them on the air (they won't). The NYT Is no better. They worked so hard to prove they are not agaisnt the war that they ended up cheerleading for it. Meanwhile, we're so busy looking for enemies in our own ranks that we keep forgetting that there are real people out there who want to undo everything that Democrats have accomplished over the last century.