Monkey Business
When a television show relies on wild animals for comic relief, something has gone horribly wrong. NBC’s newest miss, Animal Practice, features a main character played by a capuchin monkey named Crystal.
Not only is the use of a monkey on the show creatively tired, it’s incredibly irresponsible. Operators of primate sanctuaries are bracing themselves for the influx of discarded monkeys that will inevitably result from Crystal’s appearance on the show.
When a monkey was featured on Friends several years ago, misguided viewers rushed to buy one; not long after, sanctuaries were flooded with so-called pet monkeys after the owners realized that they were unprepared to meet these complex animals’ specialized needs. Monkeys like Crystal are taken from their loving mothers—a heartbreak they seldom recover from—shortly after birth. Tufted capuchin monkeys like Crystal are meant to live in the Amazon rainforest in large groups—foraging for food, using tools, and swinging through the jungle canopy. It’s appalling that producers are treating this highly intelligent animal as little more than a prop.
Readers can let the network know that they don’t get the joke by turning the channel.
Julia Gallucci, M.S.
Primatologist
Los Angeles
*
Spoiler-Proof Voting
In regard to Tom Sturm’s column on Instant Runoff Voting (“No More ‘Lesser of Two Evils,'” Oct. 11): There’s an even simpler idea. It’s called approval voting, a system that uses the same ballots and the same machines, but lets you vote for as many candidates on the ballot as you’d like, counting all votes. By counting all the votes and not using the complicated elimination rounds of IRV, you get a spoiler-proof system that’s also easier to count and less likely to eliminate a good compromise candidate.
These systems—either IRV, or Approval, or other anti-spoiler systems like Majority Judgment—are not such anathema to politicians as you might think. The stronger party in a region is the one who has most to lose from spoiler candidates, and so the most to gain from fixing the voting system.
Even if you like one of the two-party candidates, voting reform has something for you. Just as commercial competition motivates better customer service, a healthier electoral competition would motivate better voter service.
Jameson Quinn
via Internet
*
A New American Revolution
There comes a time when a people must dissolve the political bands which have connected them and get back to basics. The American two-party system is cancerous, and it is killing America. When cancer is malignant, there is only one treatment: cut it out!
It is time for a new American Revolution. The grass roots of America must rise up and remove any elected national, state, county or city official who is a member of any party, then only elect people who have no association to any political party to represent them in these offices. When doctors cut into a malignant cancer, their main objective is to get rid of all of it. That is what the above will do.
The cause of the cancer is the Federal Reserve, which is owned by the international moneychangers. For America to become what our founders believed it could become, we have to get back to basics. Kill the bank again, as Jackson did. Nationalize all 12 of its in order to keep the system working. The U.S. Treasury Department will then fulfill our money needs without further debt.
To protect our work, tariffs should be erected to levels such that nothing can come into America cheaper than we can make it. Revoke all free trade deals. Disconnect from the World Trade Organization, the Bank of International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund.
Over the past few years, China and other emerging powers such as Russia have been making agreements to move away from the U.S. dollar in international trade. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) also plan to start using their own currencies when trading with each other. Russia and China have been using their own national currencies when trading with each other for more than a year. We should join them in doing this.
Using U.S. dollars as the world’s form of trade payments was set into action by the international moneychangers with the goal of eventually having a one-world currency under their control.
At the same time, we need to repeal the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and dissolve the IRS, because there will be no need for personal or corporate income taxes. That will take away the strength of the tax-free foundations that have been controlled by the international moneychangers as a means to alter society and cause wars.
Tom Millican
Conover, N. C.
