Letters to the Editor
ukiyo
Published Letters: 15 Editor's Choice: 4
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A real free-market solution
[Read the article: Is CAFE kaput?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Instead of dancing around CAFE standards and trying to come up with artful alternatives, why not do what the so-called conservatives advocate and let the market decide? But I mean really let the market decide.
Let's stop subsidizing the oil and gas industry and let the true cost of oil be revealed. No more loan guarantees for new pipelines--if the companies who would build them don't want to take the risk, then they don't get built until the price of oil is sustained at a high enough level to bring them back to the table.
People will not alter their consumption if they continue to be insulated from the true cost of oil. So instead of giving Republicans a new raft of taxes to complain about, I say we hold their feet the the fire of their own ideaology and let the market work its magic.
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Two Title IX stories to illustrate the debate
[Read the article: "Gender crossing" in high school sports must be stopped!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]That was the law that forced schools to allow girls to play on boys' teams if there was no girls' team in the same sport at the given school or organization. It also worked the other way around.
I played hockey in Massachusetts and in the early 80's my JV team had the only (maybe the first) girl in the league. She was a forward, not very big (5'4", 120 lbs max) but was a smart player and held her own. One game, a big six-foot-plus defenseman gave her a cheap shot in the back after a whistle. Shelly turned around and popped that guy in the face so hard his head snapped back. She got a penalty, but nobody fucked with her after that.
Twelve years later my mom sent me a newspaper clipping. It was a "local girl makes good" story on Shelly who was now playing for Team USA. Massachusetts had a decent girls' league back then, but if Shelly hadn't had the chance to play high school JV, she probably would never have been able to elevate her game to the point where she could compete at the highest level in the world.
The other story came from a guy I knew in college. He and some buddies used Title IX to join the girls' field hockey team at his high school. They wore the same uniforms and did pretty well thanks to their size and speed. They even went on Oprah. But they didn't win every game--some teams were just plain better at field hockey than they were, size and speed not withstanding.
My point with all this is that it's probably impossible to apply a blanket rule about gender-mixing in youth sports. Boys playing on girls' teams does not automatically mean the boys will dominate any more than girls playing on boys' teams means the girls will be crushed.
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Is the pattern clear yet?
[Read the article: More top brass blast Rumsfeld]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Lack of self-awareness, inability to admit mistakes, no tolerance for dissent, replacing competence with ideology...
These are the hallmarks of the Bush administration and they've been repeated everywhere from Iraq to New Orleans. Why the president still has even a 33% approval rating is beyond me.
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A real journalist
[Read the article: Helen Thomas shows the press how it's done]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Helen Thomas has more balls, if you'll pardon the metaphor, than all the stuffed shirts (male and female) of Fox News put together. She gets ignored for what, two years? Then when she finally gets called on her first words are, "you'll be sorry" followed by the one question nobody in the Lapdog Corps wants to ask: why are we in Iraq?
I wish we had more of her.
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The 'gifted' label
[Read the article: The hothouse effect]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]That word was applied to me only once, by my parents, after I scored in that range on an IQ test in third grade. I had only a vague idea of what it meant, but the power of it was undeniable. I was mystified by it.
Fortunately, my folks didn't make too big a deal out of it and I went through the rest of my education under the gifted-and-talented radar. That's the good news.
The bad news is that throughout my public school experience I was rarely challenged and grew very accustomed to being able to meet or exceed expectations with minimal effort. By the time I got to university, I had only occasionally really worked in my studies. I did OK, graduated with a 3.2, and all is well. I just wonder what would have happened if I had been given that 'gifted' status to live up to.
More recently, I watched my stepdaughter--an extremely bright, articulate and insightful kid--flirt with failing her sophomore year of high school only to become a straight-A student almost overnight after being admitted to a special program. She took a core curriculum of advanced high school classes and the rest was real college courses (the program was actually on a community college campus).
She was never tagged as "gifted" but I'm sure her IQ is up there. The point here is that highly intelligent kids have special needs just like the students who bear that unfortuante label. We're full of compassion for a child working to overcome dyslexia but who will shed a tear for the gifted kid who flunks out? Most people would probably see that as a shortcoming of character or a simple lack of discipline.