Web Letters | The Nation

The NCAA: Poster Boy for Corruption and Exploitation

Colleges will claim that football and basketball make money for only a few of the elite sports schools. Don’t be fooled. The value of sports to a university is “off the books.” Alumni stay in the contribution pool and provide larger donations because of their continued loyalty to their alma mater’s sports teams. Of course, the TV money and product sales shared by athletic conferences don’t hurt either.

If colleges are to remain the minor leagues for the NFL and NBA, Dave Zirin’s wish list comes up short. The following additional protections should be added:

1. The NBA and the NFL should pay a standard wage to all “student” athletes; all should recieve the same amount; TV and other promotional funds should go into that compensation pool.

2. Colleges should guarantee an education; athletes who are less than stellar scholars cannot do their day job, football or basketball player, and do justice to their education. If they do not advance in their pursuit of professional sports, the college should guarantee an appropriate education.

If Corporations Don't Pay Taxes, Why Should You?

Government wrote the tax laws that corporations must obey. No illegal behavior was executed, only possibly suggested. I’d really like to know how much these corporations actually paid in taxes, not how much they legally avoided. Lastly, of course these corporations expect government and military support in case of trouble. I’d expect no less for even the bottom 1 percent of (non-income) taxpaying citizens in this country.

Wresting Gun Policy From the Hands of the Radical Fringe: A Q&A With Garen Wintemute

I have read that every Swiss household has a loaded rifle in it. Also, that they don’t have a steroid-crazed LAPD harassing poor people and shooting wildly, out of jurisdiction, at elderly women trying to make a living. I, as a retired web developer, actually have a serious case against my police department. Indeed, I lived in San Pedro, California, at the time. Dorner and his best friend, er, Officer Evans (the face-kicker) rolled out of there. What happened to me was absurd, terrifying and utterly unlawful.

I choose not to fear poverty or poor people. So I am often yakking it up with random drug dealers I meet in headshops, or itinerant workers from down south. I have two pen pals in Ukraine. I am of Cossack ancestry; we were deliberately genocided by Lenin, the Bolsheviks and Stalin in numbers that ridicule Hitler’s Final Headcount. I believe I understand how tyranny by cop demoralizes people.

Add to that the pharma crisis. I am a former assistant professor of psychology, so I want add that I believe the underlying cause of many many phenomena we fail to understand is prescription psychotropic meds. The evidence is now conclusive. They cause these mass shootings, to a one.

Why are Americans not behaving like the Swiss? I have done my own research and I am fully convinced that it is pharma. I am ready for the Supreme Court. So is Jon Rappoport, though I haven’t asked his view on that!. The FDA is not going to enjoy the facts the nation is now aware of because his writings.

I hope we can restore dignity to human children. The drugs cause sleepwalking, which the FDA-designed patient inserts foolishly refer to as somnolence. Sleepwalking, sleepdriving, sleepshooting.

The young man who allegedly did the Sandy Hook massacre is said to have had had Aspberger’s syndrome. If so, it has nothing to do with a massacre. To massacre is to be psychotic. Yet, by definition, Aspberger’s is not a psychosis. If he was on pharma, then I’d bet the pharma made him do it. Same with the movie theater. Once can tell by the raised eyebrows of the accused. To my eye, that is a chemically driven facial tick, not a facial expression of emotion.

Time will tell. Serious business here. Thank you to Dr. Wintemute and the author of the piece for taking it as seriously as you do.

Lockheed Martin's Herculean Efforts to Profit From Defense Spending

Jeremian Houlka’s article is rather misleading. I have worked for a number of companies, big and small, throughout the United States, and I rate Lockheed Martin #1. They are both frugal and have the most accomplished personnel. Working for the Defense Department is not always profitable. On one very large aircraft design, the contract requirements were changed significantly, but the contract did not allow additional funding. As a result, Lockheed Martin lost a lot of money and refused to bid further on this aircraft. In the end, both parties lost.

The AC-130 is the most versatile and valuable aircraft design in history. It can do things than no other single aircraft can do, and it can do it at least cost. The performance, for such an old design, is remarkable. It is without a doubt the best military aircraft that this country has ever produced. You may never know what all it can do or has done. Rememeber, it was first designed near the end of WWII! It has been redesigned many times since.

There are many things that Lockheed Martin can do and has done that will probably never be known. There contribution to the defense of our country has been uppermost of all of these military contractors, and I have worked for several of them. Remember that they contributed substantially to Star Wars, which resulted in our winning the Cold War.

I have been semi-retired for several years, but I would have stayed with Lockheed Martin if their retirement policy had been somewhat different. It was one of the best professional experiences of my life to work with capable superiors and fellow workers.

Fix the Debt's Fuzzy Math

Dean Baker and Paul Krugman have been making rational arguments against cutting the pillars of our social safety net as it is, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, as a means of deficit reduction. However, their reasoned arguments are losing to the “deficit scolds.”

It is not merely that the Peterson Foundation is a better-funded propaganda machine. It is that its arguments are easier to understand: the government built up a huge debt, and thus it has to curtail spending. The “entitlement programs” spend the most, so they must be cut back.

President Obama has not been able to articulate the wrongheadedness of this approach in a pursuasive manner. He has tried, but his partial embrace of the goals of the deficit hawks has compromised his presentation.

Dean Baker writes intelligently about these issues; he is little known among the punditry. Paul Krugman is a more visible spokesman for rationality, however, he comes across as too professorial and has an dismissive smirk (it’s justified, I love the smirk, but it diminishes his influence) so that he has not been able to change public opinion.

No one is making the obvious defenses for the preservation of Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security: they work; the elderly, ill and disabled have enjoyed a decent standard of living because of them; they do not have the resources or earning capacity to replace those benefits privately; to the extend life expectancy has increaed for these folks, you can thank these programs. The changes needed to preserve the programs are the same changes needed to rein in healthcare costs for the general population; and these improvements are what we should focusing on.

We need a strong spokesman for rational healthcare reform. Until such a voice emerges, the best we can do is hold those who want to gut “entitlements.” No deal may not be good; it is a better alternative to an ill-conceived impoverishment of these programs.

Torture and Taboo: On Elaine Scarry

Freud’s misunderstanding of classical Greek literature strikes again: “What incest was for Oedipus and his Greek audience, torture is for us: the polluting stink that incites outrage and demands expiation.” The Greeks had no “incest taboo.” They had a whole pantheon of incestuous gods. Only cultures that keep large herds of animals seem to have incest taboos. Killing his (unknown to him) parent is the taboo Oedipus violated. The nature of his self-mutilation should have made it clear, even to Freud, what Oedipus regretted: he blinds himself (does not want to “see” what he’s done), rather than castrating himself.

A New Pope—African, Latin American, Woman, Nice Guy—Will Change Nothing

I agree with this author that nothing will change. However, I am curious, why does he peddle an incorrect notion of the teaching of papal infallibility? Most Catholics know that the pope is not infallible, and that only “ex cathedra” pronouncements are considered to be infallible by the church (and apparently there have been only three ever, the last being the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the 1800s). Even if they don’t understand the theology, Catholics know that the Catholic Church does not teach that the pope generally is infallible. Why continue to perpetuate the false premise that the Catholics view the pope himself as infallible in everything he teaches? Further, while I disagree with many church teachings, the author acts like it’s obvious that the church is wrong about nearly everything it teaches, but he presents it more like fact than opinion.

A New Pope—African, Latin American, Woman, Nice Guy—Will Change Nothing

Anyone has a right to an opinion, and Mr. Kisling, your opinion is wrong. Your work is devoid of any scholarship and you will be held accountable for the words you have set out from your forked fingers. I am betting that the forked tongue would show itself in conversation.

It seems that there are quite a few apostates in this fractured world. It is time that you be labeled. rebuked, and marked for “what you really are and what you really believe.” You are not courageous, clever or even coherent. Get together with Gary Wills and have a few laughs while you can.

Your career and personal life will take a nosedive and your livelihood will be threatened, and you will think that is is “just the way it is.” Any reader that thinks you are credible will also be tainted by the stain of your filth.

I suggest that you write about Wall Street, politics, or the contents of the sewers because that’s is what is in your mind.

Take a deep breath and savor the aroma!

What's Wrong With Obama's Drone Policy

Mr. Cole writes: “Governments have always killed the enemy during wars, and it is not unlawful to do so. No one accuses Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt of ‘extrajudicial assassinations’ because their troops killed tens of thousands of enemy soldiers without charges or trials. That the Confederate soldiers were American citizens doesn’t change that fact.”

A war is a conflict between two sovereign nations (the Confederate States of America declared itself a sovereign nation). Giving credence to expanding the definition beyond that to fighting small groups and even individuals is most of why these debates are even necessary.

A one-time event, however horrendous, by an organization other than a sovereign state does not constitute a war, and as such, there really should be no question that indefinite detention and extra-judicial killings are illegal.

In a war, such as you describe above, the enemy combatants are generally easily recognizable by their uniforms. They act and move together in recognized units and usually follow the rules of war concerning prisoners, etc. Even civilian spies, in time of war, are given a trial before execution.

In every instance, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, we should have learned by now that fighting native guerrillas, even the midst of an actual war zone, is a stupid idea that only generates more anamosity and therefore more guerilla activity. Just because it now can be done remotely doesn’t make it right or make it an actual war.

It’s this notion that it is an actual war that gives government license to to attack individuals, including Americans and in at least one instance American children, under the AUMF. It’s the reason congress passed and the president signed into law an act, in the form of the NDAA, that essentially declares war on it’s own citizens.

A war is a war, and counterterrorism is counterterrorism, and we’ve been fighting enough of both lately that we ought to be able to tell the difference.

Hillary Clinton, State Feminist?

Hillary Clinton is a disgrace to our country. All she has accomplished is to show that women can rattle sabers as well as men and that they can help overthrow democratic governments (Honduras) and usher in dicatatorships. Some women’s liberation!