Letters for October 15, 2015

Cheapskate Walmart

Re “It’s baaaaaack” (Newslines, by Meredith J. Cooper, Oct. 8):

The recent article about the Walmart in Chico proposing to expand stated that Walmart was bragging that it donated $13,000 to Chico nonprofits. This has to be a typo. Walmart has annual revenues of $473 billion!

There are many families in the Chico area who donate more than $13,000 to local charities. Walmart is known nationally as a cheapskate when it comes to supporting local communities, but just $13,000?

Bob Mulholland

Chico

On aid-in-dying

Re “Virginia and Brittany” (Second & Flume, by Melissa Daugherty, Oct. 8):

Thank you for your editorial about Virginia and Brittany [Maynard]. My cousin, Julie, passed away from the same brain tumor, glioblastoma, in July of 2014. She was diagnosed in early April of the same year with three tumors, all inoperable.

She was only 56 years young and a lover of life—a competitive runner, a hiker, very physically fit. She loved riding quads with friends, especially after the first snow. To watch her waste away was incredibly difficult. A weaker person would have never lasted as long as she did.

I fully support this bill and the option that it provides to terminal individuals. Julie’s family will never know if she would have chosen that option, but I truly wish it would have been available for her. So many times during her decline, I recall conversations with her sister discussing how we end our animals’ lives when there is no longer any hope and why couldn’t there be an option like this.

I will miss her beautiful smile but will always hold her in my heart!

Patty Ellis

Magalia

‘Guns don’t kill people …’

Re “Quit pandering to the NRA” (Guest comment, by Dean Carrier, Oct. 8):

The public outcry for tighter gun control laws that always follows rare but highly publicized shootings is superstitious. Such would only make it harder for law-abiding citizens to get guns; criminals steal their guns or buy them on the black market. Further, tighter restrictions would have little effect on the more than one gun per person already circulating in America.

Even if every gun could be seized and destroyed, disgruntled citizens would then likely switch from mass shootings to mass burnings, bombings, gassings and poisonings, which could be even deadlier. It’s been said again and again: Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. The way to end gun violence isn’t to make it harder for law-abiding citizens to get guns. Rather, it’s to eradicate the tensions and injustices that drive all forms of violence.

Nathan Esplanade

Corning

‘About the same’

Re “Bridging the gap” (Editorial, Oct. 8):

The mythology of feminism continues to perpetuate the erroneous political belief that men make more money then women, when in fact they don’t. Men and women make about the same. The feminist math leaves all kinds of factors out of the equation, such as men working more overtime, men doing 98 percent of the dangerous heavy construction labor and constituting 91 percent of workplace injuries, men staying longer on the job and acquiring seniority (women have the luxury of dropping out of the workplace), men being four times as likely to ask for a raise, etc.

Single men on a yearly basis actually make less than single women, because much of male work is seasonal. In large metropolitan areas single women without kids make 8 percent to 20 percent more than single men. The paradigm has shifted, but the feminist front cannot accept it because it would expose the fabric of lies that holds feminism together.

Mike Peters

Chico

The wage gap can be accounted for by taking into account women’s choices in career paths. A 2009 paper commissioned by the Department of Labor (An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women) concluded that the 23 percent wage gap can be explained by “the result of individual choices being made by both female and male workers.” But. I agree. Women are just in general weaker than men and need all the help they can get in order to compete in the job market today.

John Harbour

Chico

Editor's note: After adjusting for women's career choices, even the most conservative figures from studies, including the one mentioned above, reveal a wage gap of 4.8 percent to 7.1 percent. In other words, men continue to make more money than women.

Trump/Hitler comparison

Re “Of Trump and Hitler” (Letters, by Nathan Esplanade, Oct. 8):

I would like to thank Mr. Esplanade for clarifying that he truly is as anti-Semitic and racist as his first letter (“Trumpeting Trump”) implied. I had managed to convince myself that no one in this day and age would endorse a candidate by comparing him to Hitler, and that I must have misinterpreted his comparison.

Luckily, he wrote again to explain how Jews “push as brazenly and as hard as they can to take all they can until someone legally or physically stops them.” Thank goodness Hitler had the foresight to “legally and physically [stop] them.” (Lest anyone misinterpret my letter, that was sarcasm.)

Mr. Esplanade appears to hope that Trump will employ a similarly final solution against Mexican immigrants. I suppose I should also thank him for providing me with such a perfect example to discuss in my class on prejudice, hate and racism.

Dory Ann Schachner

Chico

I am so glad that Nathan Esplanade lets us know that he is “not anti-Semitic or anti-Mexican.” Otherwise we might take his stupid and blatantly anti-Semitic and anti-Mexican remarks at their face value. Just as a point of information, Jews and Mexicans have been on this continent since the 1500s. Neither group needs anyone’s approval to be good Americans.

Michael Mulcahy

Chico

I read Nathan Esplanade’s letters to the editor on Trump and Hitler. It is clear whose side Mr. Esplanade would have been on in World War II and it ain’t the winner’s.

Beau Grosscup

Chico

Forgive my cynicism regarding any sentence that begins with, “I’m not anti-Semitic or anti-Mexican,” when it follows “Trump is like Hitler in recognizing that a race of people are selfishly and aggressively displacing a native population’s own race, culture, values and control of the country.”

Nice. I’m sure the Brownshirts would be quick to agree.

Robert Quist

Chico

‘An ignorant man’

Uncle Ben Carson with the grinning face of that American icon on every box of white rice, is anathema to my upbringing as an African-American. His exiguous mindset plays into the hands of those who want this country to go backward. I have friends who are black conservatives, but are not in his league at all. He is an ignorant man when it comes to social skills, just as Donald Trump is.

We have seen enough of this tearing down of America since the almost eight years of do-nothing Republicans and Tea Party backlash against President Obama. Ben Carson’s achievements as an intelligent surgeon are unquestioned. There is nothing wrong with having an ego, but being an egoist can be very harmful to certain men and women. In fact, this would-be emperor has no clothes.

Jerry Harris

San Francisco/Chico

Banners are inappropriate

Re “Beyond the banner” (Editorial, Oct. 1):

How do you decide what’s important? How about the biggest discretionary item in the U.S. budget? As first reported in Mother Jones magazine, in January of this year, then in the Fiscal Times in March, and then by Reuters in June, $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money given to the Pentagon has not been accounted for. That’s our tax money we are talking about!

Do you really want to put up plastic banners for a group that can’t tell us where our money goes? As long as we have so many homeless veterans and as long as the Pentagon budget is so out of control, it seems inappropriate, at this time, to put up Chico Military Heroes’ banners.

Charles Withuhn

Chico

A bill worth considering

At the North State Water Action Forum on Sept. 22, state legislators and Rep. Doug LaMalfa joined a crowd at the Elks Lodge to discuss a proposed new water storage project for the North State. A main theme of the evening was planning for the future in our endeavors now, and working across the aisle to gain support for projects.

One of the easiest ways Rep. LaMalfa can do this for our community and the rest of our country is with the PREPARE Act, named a “low-hanging fruit” by the National Taxpayers Union, which names 10 pieces of legislation per year that any legislator, regardless of party, should find no reason not to support. PREPARE is listed at No. 2 for good reason. This bill will update our national emergency preparedness plans and empower regional branches of federal service agencies to use best practices that save extensive and unnecessary costs on post-emergency repairs.

With ever-increasing extreme weather events, wildfires included, this bill practically has “help Northern California!” stamped at the top. Please encourage our CA-1 district representative to co-sponsor this bill by calling or emailing his office today, as we continue to tend fire evacuees in the region.

Meagan Fischer

Chico