San Diego Reader

Please provide a prompt response regarding the actions that the Reader will take to rectify this situation so that no further legal action is necessary.

Paula C.P. de Sousa
Alison D. Alpert
Best Best & Krieger LLP

No quotations attributed to Mr. Tucker were made by him. The article was a parody. — Editor

Outpaced By The Snail

Don Bauder’s June 24 article “Snail Pace” (“City Lights”) contained a lot of good information; however, I’m not sure that the economy is even moving at a snail’s pace. We have 15 percent–plus unemployment, businesses are still laying off people, and unemployment benefits will soon come to an end.

People still think that the economy will magically bounce back. Our most recent economic booms involved the internet bubble and the housing bubble. Each turned out to represent pseudo economic growth — that is, growth based upon exaggerations and overspeculation. We also continue to export technology and jobs abroad to lower costs. This has come back to bite us in the form of unemployment.

The real question is “What will generate jobs in America?” Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s the iPhone, the iPod touch, or the iPad when they are being made in China. If an efficient solar panel is developed, it’s likely that it will also be manufactured out of the country.

The real problem is that the U.S. can no longer dominate in the current global economy. If a worker in China is making $2 per hour and a worker in the U.S. is making $14 per hour for the same job, the tendency in a world economy is for each to eventually make $8 per hour. Unfortunately, this is what we are experiencing, and the result will be a lower standard of living.

Ronald Harris
via email

Holy Hypnosis, Batman!

I usually wait for everyone else to comment and then add mine. In response to the many letters regarding Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Reader has given the other side of the issue, doing marvelous articles in “Sheep and Goats” (April 8), for example.

My take is that this group tries to make people believe that they are promoting the Bible in order to lure them into their cult and brainwash them using hyper-gnosis (hypnosis). People are then fed drugged Holy Communion in order to take their money and part of their lives. I consider Jehovah’s Witnesses, along with the Baptists, to be among the most ruthless of all religions. Both are secretly operated by the Masons, whose pyramid is on the back of the dollar bill and who use the 13-based spirituality of ancient paganism to abuse power. Ministers abusing these powers get just as “high” doing so as junkies do by using crack. And they get just as addicted. I consider Jehovah’s Witnesses to be a street gang that uses spirituality (love) instead of heroin to addict and control its members.

Name Withheld
via email

I Can’t Picture It

I would like to comment on your cover story in the June 24 Reader titled “We Only Have Eight Fingers to Work With.” It’s an interesting story about harps, but it would have been a lot more interesting if you’d showed a couple of pictures of harps. The author’s trying to explain how the pedals work and how the mechanism modifies the strings to give sharps, naturals, and flats, and I couldn’t make head or tail out of it. Even though there was a program, coincidentally, on KPBS last night — that would be Thursday night, June 24 — that actually showed a harp competition, all the girls playing the harp. It showed a little bit of the harp but not many details on how the things are constructed and how they work.

You’ve got four cute cartoons on the cover and four on page 36, and I wish you’d devoted a little space to pictures. He talks here about two different types of harps and tries to describe them. One picture is worth a thousand words, don’t they say? If you’d had pictures of these two harps and also pictures of the detail of how the pedal works — and he talks here about the “pedals move rods that run up through the column” — what column? I’ve got no idea what he’s talking about. Also, he talks about “a wood-paneled acoustic shield juts out from above the stage at Copley Symphony Hall” — I can’t visualize that.

Bob
University City

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