This is green?

Please explain exactly how an industry that would clear the woods of southern Arkansas by the square mile (cover story July 1) and dump the product in a blender could be considered “green.”

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Bill Shepherd

Little Rock

Presidential giants

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The Democrat-Gazette (that name still sticks in my craw) cartoonist on the last Sunday in June had a funny sense of history. He depicted Presidents Reagan and Lincoln as giants and Presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama as somehow inferior to them. I guess he still believes in trickle-down economics (does anyone still buy that?), and equates the giants as liberators. President Reagan had very little to do with the liberation/transition of the Soviet Union into armed camps still mostly opposed to western interests and with lots of unaccounted for fissionable materials. The wall that needs to be torn down now is between verified science and crackpot climate change deniers. Who knew ignorance would become so fashionable?

I wonder if anyone has been paying attention to energy policy these days. The disaster in the Gulf is terrible, but distracts us from any discussions of long-term policy. While I didn’t agree with Obama’s stance on offshore drilling, which by the way was a bone thrown to the opposition to get any kind of energy policy established, he still recognizes, as any adult should, the limitations of our present hydrocarbon addiction. And how many thousands of commentators and others have to point out that if the short-sighted Reagan hadn’t turned back Carter’s energy policies, we would now be the world leader in alternative energy technology instead of China, and not need to import a single drop of oil from the Middle East. Our debt to China now pales in comparison to how beholding we will be in the future for their energy technology, which we could easily have developed here if we had not listened to Big Oil. It only makes sense that if you have a commodity, you don’t want competition for that commodity. As a man named Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan said, “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from it.”

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Jay Sims

Little Rock

Please, no lion burgers

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I was shocked to hear that lion burgers are being served at a restaurant in Arizona. I was even more upset to hear that this isn’t something new or out of the ordinary. That this meat is considered game meat and so easily obtainable is hard to believe since lions in Africa are a threatened species with only about 20,000 left. If we do nothing, they may be extinct by 2020.

I can’t believe an Arizona restaurant is serving lion burgers. I can’t believe it’s legal. And the butcher has already been convicted of illegal underground trading and uninspected meat! Shouldn’t be too hard to put a stop to this. I used to think I’d like to live in Arizona, but lately they have been showing us how redneck they are.

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By banning the breeding of big cats in the private sector, it would make it impossible for U.S. dealers to acquire and sell this meat. Neither the USDA nor the FDA has the manpower to inspect, regulate, and ensure the quality or origin of this food source. Please sponsor or co-sponsor a bill that would ban the breeding, buying and selling of big cats in the U.S. (other than AZA zoos).

Janet Sorensen

Little Rock

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Arkansas’s Pravda

It seems to me that the ignorance of the Arkansas Times is only exceeded by its hypocrisy!

You wax eloquent on the political misgivings in South Carolina in your editorial of 10 June 2010, but leave out a person by the name of Alvin Greene. If you going to give white Southern republicans hell, why not black Democrats like Alvin Greene?

He ran unopposed, without any campaign commercials or expenses, and the liberal left is aghast about how he got elected. I first heard it mentioned on the radio, but he was not identified by race (a particular hypocrisy the media has, wrongdoers who happen to be white ALWAYS have their race mentioned, or pictures shown, but if it is a person of color you have to really dig to find out that fact!).

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Here is a hint for all you brain dead liberals: he got elected because he was black! Blacks bloc voted in the primary based on his skin tone, whereas if whites had done that the Arkansas Times would be raising several kinds of Hell!

I even heard one black Democrat in South Carolina trying to say that Greene was a Republican plant because this election had “Elephant dung” all over it!

No, Greene is not a Republican byproduct; he is the inevitable result of the liberal lunacy found in the Democratic Party. You might want to mention some charges against Mr. Greene also, that is if you intend to really do your duty of informing the masses, instead of being Arkansas version of Pravda.

Joseph Anthony

Redfield

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