Here are Letters to the Editor for May 16, 2019…

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(TOM PURCELL/Tom Purcell is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist and is nationally syndicated exclusively by Cagle Cartoons Inc. Send comments to Tom@TomPurcell.com.)

Prom season is upon us. We all know what that means: More American adults are doing their proms all over again.

A New York Times headline about a growing number of adults says they are taking “A Second Shot to Have the Best Night of their Lives.”

And carry on like a bunch of retrograde adolescents.

The modern prom, reports Slate, “may be traced to the Ivy League and the annual tradition of a ‘presentation week,’ during which formal dress and dancing accompanied a promenade concert.”

Not content with only the well-to-do experiencing the awkwardness and misery of the prom, high schools across America embraced it, particularly after World War II. Now the prom is a rite of passage for American teens everywhere, with many blowing thousands of dollars on their big nights. More

(DON BRUNELL/Don C. Brunell is a business analyst, writer and columnist. He retired as president of the Association of Washington Business, the state’s oldest and largest business organization, and now lives in Vancouver. He can be contacted at theBrunells@msn.com.)

With the dust settling from the 2019 legislative session, the focus is assessing the impacts on taxpayers and our economy.

Our state’s budget grew by a whopping 17.5 percent, which is one of the largest increases ever. Gov. Jay Inslee and his Democrat colleagues who controlled the legislature came to Olympia last January set on raising taxes despite higher than projected revenue collections.

“Rather than looking for cost savings, lawmakers chose to raise more than $1 billion in new taxes over the next two years and $2.5 billion over four years,” Association of Washington Business (AWB) President Kris Johnson said in a session-ending press release.
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(BRANDON HANSEN/Managing Editor of the Chewelah Independent)

Many tendons and muscles were irreparably damaged in the making of this photo. (Jared Arnold photo)

Your body has a funny way of reminding you that you’ve made terrible life decisions.

With Bradley Taekwondo’s Spring Tournament happening this weekend, I decided I would give one of their classes a try and write about the experience. Surely, with my routine of occasionally hopping on an exercise bike, I would be able to handle it.

But the first signs of trouble popped up during the stretching period of class. After doing something called a pretzel stretch, I had the strangest and most alarming sensation in my hamstrings. It wasn’t so much they got pulled or strained beyond capacity. It was something along the lines of “WHOAH, you haven’t used me in a while and now you’re expecting me to do this?”
[Think of it like trying to coax a house cat to come to you when you call its name.] More

Here is a Letter to the Editor for the May 2, 2019 edition of the Chewelah Independent talking about the WDFW and predator management inside Stevens County.
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(BRANDON HANSEN/Managing Editor)

Chewelah’s Got Talent is this weekend, and we will get a full range of acts from across the county that will no doubt impress. Sadly I didn’t get the chance to tryout, because, nobody wants to hear me sing Katy Perry in public again. But it did get me thinking, what inherent talents do the people of Chewelah have just by growing up here? I made a list, because of course I did.
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(BRANDON NOBLES/Guest Columnist)

Last week, the media was completely abuzz with the photos of the world-renowned landmark, Notre Dame Cathedral, with its roof and famed spire completely ablaze, sending swathes of black smoke into the Parisian sky. Luckily, the brave firefighters of Paris were able to quench the blaze, saving the stone structure and the various relics – including the Crown of Thorns – and the various art pieces within it.

Plans immediately began for its restoration, with many wealthy businessmen donating millions to bring this cultural, spiritual and architectural achievement back to its former glory. While many were pleased to hear that Notre Dame has a future, there was no shortage of sabre-rattlers on social media decrying the donations and restoration, claiming that the money should go elsewhere, along with the usual passive aggressive tactics implying the presupposed avarice of the Roman Catholic Church. Many of these statements and the memes that have been spawned are quite factually – if not logically – inconsistent. While impossible to go through them all, I have created a series of rebuttals against what seems to be the “greatest hits” among them. More

Dear Editor,
Carbon dioxide is the thermostat of Earth’s atmosphere. That was demonstrated by John Tyndall, a British physicist, in experiments done in his laboratory in the 1850s. Using a relatively simple apparatus, he showed infrared radiation (heat) passes through oxygen and nitrogen gases unimpeded, whereas carbon dioxide, even in low concentrations, absorbs heat. Light energy from the sun (a spectrum of wavelengths) passes to the Earth’s surface with little absorption, bringing the energy that is transformed into heat at the earth’s surface. Carbon dioxide then traps it, hence, the name “greenhouse gas.” Far more sophisticated research has been done since, but Tyndall’s work is fundamental.

It is with sadness and alarm I encounter people today who state “but carbon dioxide is just a trace gas” as a fundamental objection to the whole of climate science. Worse, otherwise respectable media publish such drivel, lending uncritical approval to misinformation and doubt. The basic science is irrefutable, repeatable by experiment. That is how science works. No amount of bloviation from people who missed out on a basic physics education can change that, but offering them an uncritical forum will endanger us all.

Jerry E. LeClaire, M.D.
Spokane

Editor,
Maybe you caught the Nature program on PBS (that’s Public BS) about Yellowstone, and of course the endangered wolves and grizzly bears. It began by showing the great job they had done “balancing” nature in the park, and moved on to need for the heroes to go home to visit the kinfolk.

That’s when it hit me. The reason the Clintons forced the huge Siberian-Gray wolf on us is that it would help them take control a huge area they call the Yellowstone-to-Yukon Corridor. Please look up Y-to-Y on your truth device, and you will see a nearly 400 mile wide swath including nearly all of Idaho from Boise to the north, into Montana clear past Glacier Park, and all the way to the Yukon. Now that is a trail! Wildlife that survived could roam freely therein, but there would be restrictions on the humans.

It has been tried before, with the Wildlands treaty, and Ice Bump, and sanctuaries, parks, and monuments that are usually paid for by big foundations, all the way back to Defenders of Wildlife, which started in 1947 with a wolf on the logo.

A little effort and more information should help prolong our freedom to use our land and its’ resources, since Spokane is on the edge of this “Corridor,” and Colville is inside it. Think of it, a fenced community where the animals have more freedom than the people.

Try not to think of a prison camp.

Dave Robinson
Colville