Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 260 Editor's Choice: 42
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Cultural shift ahead
[Read the article: Stewart rambles, Colbert rallies! ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Lest we forget, reality shows are the bastard children of the last writers' strike. Could we bear any more of these 15-minutes-of-fame travesties? TV is less and less of an option for entertainment these days, when the 500 channels of cable are all filled with 'reality blows' and the same 20 movies play ad nauseum on the movie channels. Netflix is looking more like my evening choice, and cable will only be useful for choosing movies on the internet.
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Arrogant indeed
[Read the article: Is there a doctor in the mouse?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Because of malpractice suits, many doctors will describe several treatment regimes and say that it is up to the patient to decide how to proceed. This happened to my mom, who had ovarian cancer and two doctors, one at MD Anderson and one at Mayo. For some reason, they wouldn't talk to each other and they didn't agree, so they wanted Mom to choose. Right, a critically ill women with no other access to medical research could choose on her own! We HAD to use the internet to inform us, because the "professionals" refused to advise or provide research a layperson could understand.
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A rant like Siegel's...
[Read the article: YouTube, j'accuse!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]has "old fart" written all over it. And I don't know the guy's age, but really, his opinion doesn't matter a damn to the millions of people who live and breathe on the Internet. This generation will make use of it because it's their property, and they'll hand it off with new iterations to the next generation, blissfully ignorant of our whiny complaints.
Though I have also had "if I were a Republican for a day" thoughts, I know that these are aberrations, symptoms of extreme age and lack of coolness.
You can analyze and decry and declaim all you want, but at some point you have to see that you are superfluous in the scheme of things.
True zen realization.
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About F-ing Time
[Read the article: Netflix movie streaming coming to Macs]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I write so many of those "why isn't Mac users' money good enough for you" letters, I begin to lose hope.
And, if you travel alot, you absolutely will watch on a computer. I've been carting the netflix disks around, but maybe streaming will beat those "watched all my disks but away from home" blues.
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Healthier poor people
[Read the article: No more food stamps. You've eaten enough]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...might vote, god forbid!
No, the real culprit for obesity is the subsidization of corporate corn and soy production: they are supported by the government to continually increase the capacity to grow more calories than the populace can consume. They turn this oversupply into high fructose corn syrup and soy proteins and force it into every processed food out there. We are getting fat on those additional calories that didn't need to be in those foods, except to perpetuate that unseen market in food additives.
It's the process of cooking fresh food that is going away, supplanted and destroyed by convenience foods, because when you work two or more jobs to get by, you don't have time to do more than open a can.
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Regarding the cost of a healthy meal
[Read the article: No more food stamps. You've eaten enough]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Food cost for most fast food restaurant meals is miniscule - pennies, literally. The markup on any starch is huge -that's how they make their profits. Meats and fresh veges are more expensive, but they buy the lowest quality of those they can get away with, so they are still making money off beef and that insipid tomato on your burger.
Restaurants also have to pay for labor and equipment, not to mention stockholder dividends, so the food is not the highest cost for them. Basic foods are still reasonable in this country. Even paying retail at the grocery store you can buy beef, bread, lettuce, tomatoes and potatoes for fries far cheaper per meal than Mickey D's.
When you are getting fast food meals for 99 cents, you should worry - it's likely you are eating meats stuffed with soy protein and surplus grains and the cheapest, pesticide laden, irradiated starch and veges.
It is still possible to eat at home for pennies per home-cooked meal, but the time, skills and incentives for doing that are disappearing. When the grocery stores are filled with tempting processed microwaveable meals, when the airwaves are filled with ads for the newest franken-food that the corporate food industry creates, when Taco Bell shoves oil-laden cheeses and mystery meats into our children's faces, how many busy people can put on their blinders and just buy the basics?
Few indeed. We are all good consumers, buying up what the corporations give us to buy. The push for healthy eating is co-opted immediately by the market and turned into more processed foods, filled with additives, that have HEALTH in the name. Yes, they CAN fool all of the people, all of the time.
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Talk about poverty and eating habits
[Read the article: No more food stamps. You've eaten enough]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't think of myself as ever being poor, since I have always been healthy, educated and motivated to work. But the early 90's recession hit the ad business hard, no one was hiring and I was rolling pennies to eat. My food of choice? A six-pack, two times out of three.
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stones and glass houses
[Read the article: Don't be happy, worry]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Those of us who have a stiff drink or two or three after work, or a joint, or just a pack of cigarettes have self-medicated themselves to the approximate level of those who take antidepressants. There are the same number of side-effects. It's just that those drugs are also self-prescribed. If you have a reason to skip happy hour, you do so. If you need your concentration, the stash stays closed.
It's the cynical profit-motive of the big pharma and the way they shove their drug solutions on everyone that bothers me. (remember warnings about drug pushers who lurked near the playground? Well, now they're ensconced in the doctor's office and buying time on tv.)
You should be highly suspicious of any "drug pusher" that wants you to take a pill every day. It's incredibly more profitable for the companies and incredibly more dangerous for your body, shifting your chemical balance so that you have more likelihood of future disease, making you a lifetime pawn of the medical-pharmaceutical complex. Talk about depressing!
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Obviously
[Read the article: What's Bush's Pell Grant proposal really about?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What would 300 million do for the public school system, eh?