Features

STRANGE RINGING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’ve heard a strange ringing all over town since Rumsfeld testified Friday (about the Abu Ghraib prison abuses). It must be the sound of a million bullshit detectors! Somebody call Homeland Security! 

David Spinner 

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COMMON SENSE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Jennifer Dieges’ suggestion (Letters, Daily Planet, May 7-10) that chemotherapy patients are perfectly capable of bike-riding to and from their treatments will probably reign forever as my favorite illustration of the lunacy of arguing for policy based on an extreme and singular circumstance. 

Be glad for your relative good health, Jennifer. Many other cancer patients are extremely debilitated by their treatments, all of which differ by dose and diagnosis. I am a cancer patient who has no desire to have sick, nauseated people wheeling through dangerous streets. 

Berkeley’s policies need to reflect some honesty, and quickly, before the fashion of anti-car attitudes drives all common sense entirely away. 

Carol Denney 

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UC PAY RAISES 

Editor, Daily Planet: 

Appalled by news of annual pay of $380,000 plus housing for a new chancellor of a UC campus and other administrative UC pay raises, I telephoned UC and learned that even its highest-paid teaching professors (in the School of Law and the School of Business) earn less than $300,000! 

Of recent years, UCB, if not other campuses, has had difficulty recruiting teaching staff because of the cost and scarcity of housing! At the very least, when housing is supplied to high-paid non-teaching officials they should be charged market rents for it! 

The State Legislature, which largely funds the university, needs to put a permanent check on the regents’ magnanimity to greedy administrative hirelings, many of whom some Regents can probably list among their business acquaintances! A restrictive formula for non-teaching administrators’ pay is long overdue. It should allow only, at best, a maximum (excluding housing) of say, the median pay of the top-earning 25 percent of the university’s teaching professors. 

Until some such reform is in place UC alumni should withhold gifts to the university. 

Judith Segard Hunt 

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OVERPOPULATION 

Editor, Daily Planet: 

In regards to Michael Packer’s letter about overpopulation (Daily Planet, May 4-6) and his query: “To many, it is unclear just why California is inviting so many people here these days.” 

None of us are “inviting” the millions of illegal immigrants who are flooding across our borders every year. And most of us aren’t “inviting” the millions of legal immigrants either; the vast majority of American citizens want to seriously curtail our insane level of mass immigration. 

Who is “inviting” these people? A very small cross-section of the American public: Our politicians (who want to exploit their votes); Big Business (who want an endless source of cheap labor); and the Liberal elite. And it’ll be the very same idiots who spend the next 20 years checking in with their useless “solution” to all the problems they created in the first place. 

The California population is projected to increase from 34 million to 60 million over the next 20 years, almost entirely because of our insane level of Mass Immigration. That’s the equivalent of 30 cities the size of San Francisco popping up in California over the next 20 years. You think we have a homeless problem now? You haven’t seen anything yet. 

Peter Labriola 

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FRATERNITY HOUSE 

Editor, Daily Planet: 

Your recent article on the empty frat house (“Shortage of Pledges May Empty Frat House,” Daily Planet, May 4-6), resulting from a shortage of pledges, actually contained within it a very workable solution to the problem, but unfortunately not until you get down to the eleventh paragraph: 

“It seems that some of the boarders are actually bigger partiers that the brothers …We’ve had a few guys come in and puke all over the place…” 

Since college fraternities are, by definition, undemocratic and elitist, the obvious solution would seem to be to get as many students and citizens as possible to go in and puke all over the place, to let them know what we think of “their ways and traditions” that they want to perpetuate among future generations of students. 

Marion Syrek 

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CORRECTION 

Editor, Daily Planet: 

An article by Louis Nevaer of Pacific News Service (“Terrorist Mercenaries on U.S. Payroll in Iraq War,” Daily Planet, May 4-6) reports:  

“Erinys has been awarded subcontracts to protect American construction contractors, including San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp. ...” 

In fact Bechtel has not awarded Erinys any subcontracts for our work in Iraq. We hope, in the interest of accuracy, that you will set the record straight in a correction. 

Michael G. Kidder 

Manager of Public Affairs 

Bechtel National, Inc. 

San Francisco