Letters to the Editor
DLF
Published Letters: 267 Editor's Choice: 24
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Could be worse
[Read the article: We drive as we live]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Have you ever been to Buenos Aires? I was there last year, and I swear the average driver in BA sees all traffic signals -- most notably the striped lines that attempt to divide roads into separate lanes -- as a challenge to his masculinity. The main drag of BA, a monstrous avenue that theoretically boasts some six lanes in each direction, in practice has anywhere from seven to nine lanes going each way at any given time during the frequent and extended "rush hours."
And then there is Mexico City, where I managed to drive around the city quite well in an earlier life by the simple expedient of never, ever, ever looking in the rear view mirror. It is all you can do to keep track of the traffic in front of you; just pray to all the saints for protection from the cars, trucks, trolleys and buses gaining on you from behind. Miraculously, I survived without a single fender-bender, and the only time a traffic cop pulled me over was when I made the mistake of stopping for a red light. (If I had gone through with the rest of the traffic, they never would have caught me.)
And finally, there is the daily Russian roulette of commuting by bike in a small college town. Here in Mootown, I survive by assuming that every car on the street is trying to kill me. (I know that only a small percentage -- probably less than 0.5% -- are actually trying to kill me, but when you're talking about SUV v. Bike it ohly takes one.) The only times I've been in accidents (not serious, thank goodness, but too close for comfort) have been on occasions where I let my guard down and expected an SUV to stop at a red light or turn the right way onto a one-way street. Never again! They really are out to get you.
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Maybe they need a 12-step program
[Read the article: Quote of the day]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Dukakis and GHWB should get together and commiserate. I bet they both feel the same way.
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Top this
[Read the article: Clinton rules]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]None of the spin on Hillary Clinton can hold a candle to this doozy from Megyn Kelly (Fox News) on Michelle Obama's speech, which was promptly and appropriately skewered by Stephen Colbert last night:
"Do you think that, you know, her saying that she loves America, that she loves this country, is going to do it for those who questioned her patriotism? Because she said something -- what she said was, and I wrote it down, was, "The world as it is just won't do." If you replace "world" with "country," you're back to the same debate, arguably, that you have been having about Michelle Obama's feelings about this country. Did she give her critics any fodder with that comment?"
Yes, and if you take Fox News reporting and replace the word "Obama" with "McCain" and vice versa, it turns out they are rabid liberal media leftist radicals after all!
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Fossil vs tech
[Read the article: A clean energy investment slump?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm no expert, but it seems to me that the price of fossil fuels will inevitably rise as we burn up the easily obtainable supplies and have to dig deeper to find more. Solar and wind power, on the other hand, are inherently technological sources, and the price of technology has historically declined at a steady pace.
At some point, it seems, the price lines of the two will cross, and solar + wind + geothermal + wave-generated electricity (etc) will be cheaper than any remaining fossil fuels that can be dug out of the ground. At that point, we'll make the transition quickly and painlessly.
The only question is whether government policy (e.g. subsidizing energy tech development and a public transportation infrastructure with a carbon tax, vs. in our current world, tax subsidies to fossil fuels and the cars that use them) will speed up or delay the transition.
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The internet is a powerful tool
[Read the article: The road to Wikipedia]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Coming from the humanities, I completely agree with Herbert Gintis. In one of my three jobs (gotta make a living) -- the one I am most passionate about -- I am a translator. The internet has revolutionized literary translation for those who know how to use it. To take one tiny example: an obscure reference to "the Poet" and a snatch of Latin that would have taken weeks to track down pre-internet (probably not worth the time spent) can be accurately identified as a reference to a passage in Virgil's Georgics, and translated from the original Latin with the aid of a fine Latin linguistic database run out of Tufts University, all literally within a few minutes. Multiply that minor instance by a couple thousand over the course of the year, and you have a paradigm shift.
In other words, the internet is much more than blogs and Wikipedia, as entertaining and occasionally useful as those may be. By putting multiple reference sources and huge quantities of the textual inheritance of humanity within simultaneous reach, it makes new forms of research possible.
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McCain Goes Green
[Read the article: Celebrities don't hold campaign rallies]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The whole "Obama is a celebrity" pseudoscandal is all about the Republicans turning green... with envy. It's just sour grapes. They only wish they could fill a stadium with enthusiastic supporters.
(Don't you think Yogi Berra could have put it better, anyway? "Nobody supports Obama anymore -- he's too popular!")
As obvious as this is, for some reason the media commentators never seem to notice. Wonder why.
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My friends...
[Read the article: McCain introduces Palin, asks for money]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Four years of having to listen to McCain say "My friends..." in that unctuous tone of his. Ick. That alone is reason enough to vote for Obama.
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MPDG
[Read the article: What Sarah Palin means]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I just figured it out -- Palin is McCain's Manic Pixie Dream Girl! Read all about it:
http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/wild_things_16_films_featuring/1
http://jezebel.com/5033744/manic-pixie-dream-girls-are-the-scourge-of-modern-cinema
McCain-Palin: the feel-good comedy of the month!