Letters for December 8, 2005

Deadly idea
The Cheney-inspired “Project for the New American Century,” developed in the 1990s, led to the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq with the purpose of controlling Middle East oil.

Normally, stupid wars are fought because a nation is being invaded by another one’s army due to failures in diplomacy. We are fighting two “wars” in nations that have no armies, navies or air forces, so “guerrilla” conflict against our genocidal efforts to exterminate the “enemy.”

As you can’t kill an idea, these “wars” are as unwinnable as an occupation of the United States by Iraq would be, in spite of our desperate need for a regime change.

Walden and Betty Joura
Reno

Religion causes crime
Re “The peasants revolt, send them to bed” (Right Hook, Nov. 24):

I can’t tell you how glad I was to read Mike Lafferty’s column indicating that the underlying cause of the riots in France is the Muslim religion. I had long suspected, contrary to what the liberal media would have you believe, that the Los Angeles riots in ‘92 as well as the riots in Detriot in 1989 (the same year the Pistons won the NBA championship) were caused by Christianity. In both cases, the riots took place in overwhelmingly Christian neighborhoods. I suspected that Christianity was the real cause of these incidents and am glad Mike Lafferty was able to set the record straight.

Scott Herbst
Reno

No news is bad news
I don’t have a problem with explicit material in any newspaper, if I could find one.

There’s another sanitized story about our troops being killed. The world’s press is there. Americans see nothing.

Where’s the photo? How is that a problem when I buy into being a part of an informed democracy, reading, and then am then “protected” from seeing the true images?

The reader, who’s way over here with a cup of joe, gets the idea that there’s no meaning to a name nor military attachment and all are interchangeable.

If anyone supports the troops that much (beyond, of course, fashion), we are enabled to say, ’tween trips to the mall, what detachment is where, [and which] young men and women are losing their lives, blasted into bloody oblivion. Their blood, their last thing in the world, pooling to evaporate in some foreign desert for nothing.

There’s a lie right there. We can’t even bother [to know which young men and women are deployed where].

Jack the nozzle into the gas pump. This time, jack it harder. That’ll fix everything.

As Madison Avenue will freely attest, we are a visually-oriented species, primed for stupidity, wallets dancing deftly on the bottom line.

But if one looked up “explicit” between swallowing their daily dose of delusional—I’m sorry, crafted—crap, one finds that “explicit” means a conveyance of a fundamental character, the act of making clear and distinct. While anything in the world can be perverted—governments, religion, morals, ethics—only a fool would believe, like the Druids, that some threat incarnate somehow resides in secret outside theirself.

Craig Ayres-Sevier
Reno

And we welcome you, too
The congregation of First United Methodist Church wants the people of Reno and Sparks to know we remain more open than ever to the fullness of God’s creativity! Ages, colors, classes, creeds, conditions, genders, nationalities, sexualities—you name it, one God makes and keeps us all! While religious traditions and national denominations may quake and quarrel over opening hearts, minds, and doors to all people, local churches like ours are doing it day by day! Whoever you are, we welcome you—in the name of the One who welcomes us all!

Kay Greene
Reno

What’s censored?

Re “Censored” (Feature story, Dec. 1):

Kinda laughable that Project Censored wants to include disputes about the 2004 election among the “big stories the mainstream media ignored” last year. Who do they cite as “proof” of this but none other than Jesse Jackson writing in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (in what could only have been an opinion piece).

Perhaps Mother Jones said it best back in 2000 in an opinion piece called “The Unbearable Lameness of Project Censored:”

“It should embarrass us that Project Censored has become a thinly veiled excuse for an alternative press self-love-fest, an opportunity for us to give ourselves awards, something to convince us that we’re doing well and doing good. Are we really that insecure?” (Mother Jones, April 11, 2000)

Probably the most ignored news story about the 2004 election would be Patricia Axelrod’s lawsuit against Dean Heller over his alleged miscount of the Nevada Presidential vote. Results of said lawsuit: zip, zero, nada—nothing came out of this high-profile publicity stunt.

The main problem with any of these Project Censored stories is that even six months down the road they turn into Project Meaningless stories. Thank you for sparing us from a reprint of their whole pathetic report.

Frank Patten
Reno