They're All War Criminals
Shame on Alan Bisbort for lecturing us (once again) about what a bad president George W. Bush was while our new war-criminal-in-chief oversees the continued slaughter overseas and even promises to ramp up the killing in Afghanistan [The World This Week, April 9, 2009].
It seems doubtful that the half-million children who died in Iraq thanks to Bill Clinton would say, if they could, that the U.S. was just great until Bush came along and "wrecked" the country, or that the family in Afghanistan whose arms and legs were blown off last week by a hellfire missile are joining in the "collective sigh of relief" that Bisbort writes of now that Obama has taken office.
Never is the stunning emptiness of moral and political thought in this country more clear than when commentators on the so-called "left" gush uncontrollably over an imperialistic mass murderer because he is more "presidential" than the previous one. So what?
Trevor Davis
Greenfiel
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Mathematically Challenged
I love the direction of thinking behind Tom Sturm's article "A Plea for People Power" [April 9, 2009]. But there is a huge, atrocious arithmetic error— a factor of 10,000—and consequently what Tom presents as a practical idea is very far from it.
Tom refers to the annual electric power usage of New York City for a sense of scale, comparing it to 6 million people generating 100 watts on exercise bikes. But Tom, my brother, NYC uses something around 60,000 gWh in a year, not, as you wrote, 6 gWh. The error of scale seems to carry through the rest of Tom's suggestions (though he's only off by a factor of 1,000 on his California number).
Valley Advocate, I love you, but, please! Anybody who's paid an electric bill can see there's something wrong in Tom's logic; you don't even have to look up facts. A person generating 100 watts and selling it at 10 cents per kilowatt-hour can earn, duh, one cent an hour. Tom's day-laborers? Hope they don't take the 8 cents they made today and blow it all on dinner. Wasn't anybody home at the Advocate to save Tom (and by association those of us who share his values) from this embarrassment? Tom, Advocate, I'm sorry, you're sorry, we're all sorry. We need some attention to detail or we just look like wide-eyed crackpots.
Peter Underdown
Greenfield
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Editor's note: We stand corrected on the New York and California consumption figures, and the tongue-in-cheek utopian nuance to parts of the story is no excuse.
Two further corrections: The Valley Advocate's entry for Best Tattoo Shop in our 2009 Best of the Valley Readers' Poll edition inaccurately reported that Lucky's Tattoo and Piercing provides "subdermal implants." The shop does not and never has offered that procedure.
An April 16 story by Eesha Williams, "Labor Events Promote EFCA," was incorrectly credited. The piece was reprinted with permission from www.ValleyPost.org.
