Nevada delegation guilty of stealing votes
To the editor:
On Tuesday, the Nevada delegation to the Republican National Convention illegally stole my vote by claiming to vote their conscience instead of their civic duty, as required.
As decided by the citizens who participated in this year’s Nevada caucus, Mitt Romney was awarded 20 votes. At the convention Tuesday, our delegates, led by Dr. Wayne Terhune, a Ron Paul supporter, gave 17 votes for Ron Paul and 5 votes for Mitt Romney.
Every Republican in this state should be outraged how a coalition of a few could hijack our party here in Nevada. Now is the time to return to the primary system – where your vote can’t be stolen.
Michael O. Kreps
Las Vegas
For a brighter future
To the editor:
The Committee to Protect Nevada Jobs is dead wrong in its apparent believe that increasing funding for Nevada schools is not part of a solution to the problem of lagging student achievement (“Lawsuit again filed to stop business tax petition,” Aug. 24 Review-Journal). More adequate funding for education will make it possible for school districts to hire additional teachers, reduce the number of students in each classroom, and thereby provide teachers with the additional time they so desperately need to address the individual needs of a highly diverse student population with wide variations in ability and readiness to learn.
Teachers no longer have the luxury of teaching homogeneous groups of children with similar socioeconomic or cultural backgrounds, and well-intentioned laws that ensure that every student, regardless of ability, must be placed in a “least restrictive environment” at school has made it necessary for teachers to work in overcrowded classrooms with students whose abilities range from learning disabled to gifted.
Meanwhile, teachers are told that they must differentiate instruction in such a way that every child’s learning style and ability level is accommodated, and pages-long lesson plans must include the minute details of every process that will be used to accomplish this feat. Teachers have accepted this challenge and work hard to help students achieve success, but an action such as that of the Committee to Protect Nevada Jobs becomes yet another reminder that the deck continues to be stacked against both teachers and the students they serve.
That a group calling itself the Committee to Protect Nevada Jobs would file a lawsuit to halt an effort that seeks to provide the funding necessary to help create a more highly educated workforce that is less susceptible to downturns in the economy is simply ludicrous. The committee should immediately drop its lawsuit against the education funding initiative petition, and instead, join forces with the organizations that are promoting the petition to help ensure a brighter future for Nevada.
Brad Truax
Las Vegas
Enemy of science
To the editor:
Columnist Vin Suprynowicz, in his one-man war against science, never fails to demonstrate profound ignorance (“$2 billion paid out for vaccine injuries to kids,” Sunday Review-Journal).
Mr. Suprynowicz loves the false rhetorical tactic of using an individual incident as being somehow representative of an entire population, and he cites a family abused by the state which killed a child as evidence that vaccines are bad and should be avoided. He thereby confuses and conflates things as different as a painting of a cow with an actual car, claiming that because cars kill people, we should not drive cows or eat meat.
Mr. Suprynowicz cites pertussis and how we still have outbreaks despite vaccinations, so obviously vaccinations do not work. If he did his research he would easily find that before vaccines, in a population of 100 million, 6,000 children died annually from this disease. Compare that to less than 100 deaths annually associated with, not proved to be caused by, vaccinations. If you were to scale up to the current population, those 6,000 deaths would be 18,000 deaths. That is almost 200 times more than deaths by vaccinations, and this is just this one disease.
Seriously, how innumerate is Mr. Suprynowicz not to recognize that 18,000 deaths is much worse than 100 deaths? Or can he not do the simple math?
Then Mr. Suprynowicz says that he is not against vaccines, but just wants to inform people and recommends the books of Neil Z. Miller. Which is kind of like recommending someone read a white supremacist website to get an objective opinion on Jews. Mr. Miller claims that “according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the chances are about 15 times greater that measles will be contracted by those vaccinated against the disease than by those who are left alone.” And if you believe that, then I have a light rail system to sell you.
I am not against free speech. But if you are going to publish the rantings of people who can write well but are scientifically ignorant, and recommend to people courses of action that can make them sick, or dead, do you not think that you should have at least one person with some knowledge of how science works review their mindless writing?
And for what it is worth, the latest research pretty much demonstrates that autism, like being gay, is pretty much determined by the time the child is born. You can see the differences in children as young as six months.
Hey … maybe vaccines cause gayness? Yeah, that’s it!
I can hardly wait for Mr. Suprynowicz’s screed on AIDS, which has pretty much been nailed down as being caused by HIV. And by nailed down, I mean doctors know how it works, how it infects cells, what genetic differences make one immune to the disease and how drugs render it a chronic nuisance instead of a death sentence.
Doug Nusbaum
Las Vegas
