Letters to the Editor
alarajrogers
Published Letters: 440 Editor's Choice: 86
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Don't forget the massive subsidies
[Read the article: Bring on the biofuels]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Right now, vast amounts of corn are being grown, such huge amounts that they cannot possibly get a fair price at market. So the US government subsidizes them. One of the reasons Americans are so fat is that corn syrup is dirt cheap, and so the sweetener is added to almost everything.
If we converted the majority of American corn production from food production to biodiesel or ethanol, the actual scarcity of food corn would rise to the point where it could be sold at market for a fair price. This would cut American consumption of corn, which, frankly, is direly needed -- corn is one of the most fattening and otherwise most nutritionally useless grains. The price of soda would finally rise above the price of fruit juice, as corn syrup sweetener became more expensive. Food fried in corn oil would get more expensive than food grilled, baked or broiled -- all better for us than frying. The US government could stop subsidizing corn; the corn subsidies could be turned into an incentive program to grow fuel for biodiesel or ethanol, which would be phased out.
The issue here, really, is not that we would have to grow a lot more corn in order to make bio-fuels, and that this would be more expensive and damaging to the environment. The issue is that we *already* grow way too much corn. Americans are getting fat because we can't consume all the corn our country produces without turning obese in the process. Taking the corn we *already* produce and converting it to biodiesel or ethanol is almost free; there are already government subsidies in place to support growing cheap corn, and if they were repurposed to support converting corn to biofuel there would be no additional cost to biofuel.
Biofuel is local, renewable, and in this era of unrest in the Middle East, is good for world peace by reducing American interest in Mideast oil. It doesn't actually matter if growing extra corn costs more than refining and transporting oil, because the corn is already there. (Which is why corn rather than hemp or jojoba; it would cost more to get American farmers to plant a completely different crop.) No, it isn't a magic bullet that's going to solve all our energy problems, but we can run homes on wind power and heat them with solar power. The question is not, where do we get the energy to heat our homes and make electricity to power our cool stuff, but where do we get the energy to drive our *cars?* I don't see Americans moving back to the cities any time real soon; we like space too much. So we need a portable fuel for our cars, which wind, water and solar won't directly provide; perhaps we can use those (and nuclear, maybe) fuel sources to create hydrogen cells, but the advantage to biofuel is that it's a lot easier to use the existing infrastructure for biofuel than for hydrogen. At the *very* least it could help us get off foreign oil while transitioning to a battery technology like hydrogen.
Personally I think biofuel is a no-brainer. Right now the corn is there, our taxes are paying for it, and all it's doing is making us fat. Turn it into fuel and you get thinner Americans, who can direct their tax money to better causes, and who are less dependent on foreign oil, making us less imperialistic and less dependent on corrupt regimes like the Saudis. It makes jobs for Americans, it frees us from some degree of foreign control, what's not to like? Yeah, it's not perfect, but frankly nothing is.
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The testosterone defense?
[Read the article: Boston-area high schooler jumps on the "boy crisis" bandwagon]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Men and boys everywhere should be appalled at this idiotic lawsuit for the same reason that women should be appalled at PMS advanced as a defense for causing people harm. If boys naturally cannot control unruly behavior and perform in a controlled setting to get good grades, then boys naturally cannot do office work as well as girls, so boys will naturally be discriminated against in any profession where fine attention to detail and a lot of deskwork is required. Such as computer programming. Does anyone see the absurdity of this?
That being said, if he is arguing that girls are getting to roam the hallways without passes and not boys on the *assumption* that the boys will be bad, rather than the proven behavior of the specific girls and the specific boys, then *that* is a valid point he has the right to sue on (but not for retroactive grade inflation. Such overt discrimination against boys would warrant punitive financial reparations and making the teachers take some sort of sensitivity training on not assuming kids will be bad just because they're male.) And as a parent I would be very tempted to sue over grades being improved by decorating your notebook on the grounds that unless it is art class, children's sense of aesthetics should have nothing to do with their grade. (I decorated my notebook with bizarre slogans from the X-Men and pictures of firing squad victims. I'm pretty sure my grades wouldn't have been good in "notebook decoration" just because I'm a girl.) That's not discrimination against boys, it's discrimination against people whose art sucks, who have too utilitarian an attitude to want to decorate, or who have too morbid an aesthetic sense for teachers to appreciate -- and many of those people might be boys, but I'm pretty sure my husband's pictures of Garfield would have beaten out my firing squad victims.
But any good points this guy has have been overwhelmed by the stupidity of "it's easier for girls to behave well and follow the rules, and as a result they do well, so that's discrimination against boys." Last time I checked, unruly behavior or failure to perform got you thrown out of most office jobs as well, yet men handle those just fine.