The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Mind Your Manners

10.31.07 @ 12:01AM

(Page 4 of 5)

STATE AND PROTECTION
Re: Jay Homnick's reply (under "Armed and Defended") in Reader Mail's Richard Viguerie Weighs In:

Mr. Homnick there is NO "providing" about it, period! Your "conditions" A through B that have to be met prior to being "allowed" to defend self reminds me of the armorer's during the attack on Pearl Harbor who refused to hand out ammunition as the Japanese planes were attacking because the soldiers and sailors did not have the proper paperwork filled out. Typical Statist.

The "State" has via the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that no one has the right to expect individual protection from the State. Only a general application of the concept of "protection" is required to be met. The State is more than happy to see dead victims that were civilized enough to die quietly so that a gentle investigation could be conducted after ward, so as not to disrupt potential victims who just might begin thinking about their own "duty" to die for the State and stop any free thought about what State platitudes are really worth. See all the slaughter at "Gun Free Zones" that have become happy hunting grounds for psychotics. A free "man" has the right absolute to provide for his/her own defense without the State interfering in anyway. Any application of State power to disarm and by lack of action be complicit in the murder of such a victim as noted in your story is murder pure and simple. The fact that commentators are so wedded to the power and worship of the State with its history of absolute failure to back its empty promises of protection is an indication of disease not sanity. Any resistance by the State to self defense should in a correct world be met with force. And please no comments about the Wild West, Dodge City had fewer homicides per 1,000 in the 1860s than Washington, D.C. last year.
-- Craig Sarver
Seattle Washington

GREAT MAN, BETTER AMERICAN
Re: Ben Stein's Al's Ignoble Nobel:

I've never met Ben Stein. But over the years, I have gravitated to his wisdom on life. I consider Ben a genuine, lasting friend.

Now comes the "why." I am a 74-year-old vet who looks back on his service to country with great pride and humility. While my predominate career was "civilian," like Ben's, my values and my character put forth in that career were molded and etched into my very being during those five military years. Things you don't hear enough about today, like Honor and Duty to Country. I will never forget those times.

The beauty of Ben Stein is that he, too, unfailingly never forgets to comment on the sacrifice of the military in today's topsy-turvy world. In the military, one has many "brothers." Had Ben and I been somehow thrown together, he would instantly become a "my brother." I can only hope that the feeling would be mutual.

There is something I'd like to pass on to you, Ben. You don't have to have formally served in a military organization to qualify as a patriot. You know this, but I'd like you to hear it from me. You are the embodiment of a fine American patriot, because you are a 'brother" to all who served in the military.

God bless you for never forgetting the values that made this country great and for reminding us of what our real priorities in life should be -- never forgetting the contributions of our military men and women who gallantly serve this nation.
-- Lawrence D. Farrington
Payson, Arizona

THE ROOF IS ON FIRE
Re: Patrick J. Michaels's The Fires This Time:

Patrick J. Michaels did an excellent job of putting the current southern California fires into the context of annual weather variation. Also important to understanding California's recurring wildfires is the nature of the vegetation that is burning, known as chaparral in California. The wet-winter growing season, dry-summer regime he describes is know as "Mediterranean," and produces a shrub-dominated vegetation type that not only burns readily, but is evolved to do so periodically. The shrubs become decadent after a few decades without fire, and depend on fire to either cause vigorous resprouting from stem bases or to germinate dormant seeds, depending on shrub species. As is the case with all fire-dependent ecosystems, suppressing wildfires merely makes the problem worse; the accumulating biomass eventually will burn and when it does so, the artificially high fuel loads simply result in hotter, faster-moving fires. Not surprisingly, a high proportion of these fires occur under the conditions Michaels describes, after an above-annual rainfall winter that produces profuse herbaceous growth that adds abundant fine fuels to the fuel complex. The "problem," as Michaels points out, isn't the fires, it's the houses people persist in building in vegetation where fire is a matter of when, not if.
-- Dr. John Ortmann
Fire Ecologist

Patrick Michael's "Fire This Time" notes that Sen. Harry Reid blamed global warming for the rash of California fires. Other scientists like George Carlin and Jamie Lee Curtis have weighed in against overdevelopment as the cause. Since then we have learned that a number were set by deranged arsonists. Recalling how the Unabomber treasured his copy of Gore's alarmist Earth in the Balance, is it not likely that eco-terrorists obsessed by doom, and even inspired by Gore's Nobel Prize, may be incited to commit arson? If one truly believed overdevelopment was the menace to nature, why not set a canyon fire designed to consume hilltop homes? Why not set a trail of fires to convince the Infidels that global warming is a crisis now?
-- Tim O'Neill
Pompano Beach, Florida

KID NATION
Re: Christopher Orlet's Forever Young:

I, too, am concerned with the "kid-dult" phenomenon. But this article (and from the sounds of it, West's book) seems to equate extended adolescence with liberal politics, and maturity with traditional conservatism. Framing what's really a non-partisan political issue (the plague of immaturity is affecting just about everyone, as far as I can see) as an "us vs. them" battle of political affiliations is pretty juvenile itself, isn't it? Not every issue need be contorted into a discussion about who has the best politics -- and I'm the first to that admit liberals are just as good as conservatives at doing that.

Joseph Epstein's quoted piece, claiming that academic feminism and queer theory are best appreciated and propagated by "adolescent minds" is ludicrous. While even I, an avowed leftist, find the willful myopia of much academic theorizing to be enormously aggravating, it's not as if conservatives have a monopoly on common sense. Again, irrational idiocy exists right across the political spectrum.

Letter to the Editor

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